OpenPrinting Summit - Print Dialog and Colour Management

[Christoph Feck]

On Wednesday 16 March 2011 18:44:31 John Layt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'll be attending the OpenPrinting Summit [1] to discuss how to complete
> the Common Printing Dialog [2] and integrate it into KDE and Qt.  I'm
> looking for any feedback people may have about the CPD, and any
> questions you want me to ask while I'm there.

Many thanks, John, for never giving up with improved printing in KDE!

There a two main issues I see with the current approach of the CPD, and if 
possible, you could bring them up in the discussion.

First, regarding the "common" part of the printing dialog, I hope that using a 
common denominator of features offered in all operating systems does not 
reduce the feature set again; we already went through it. (I guess you know 
the existing bug reports. It boils down to the major feature loss that we got 
when killing KDE 3.x printing system.)

The new printing dialog should not be shy on options, such as pamphlet 
printing, customizable filters, and (most importantly) application specific 
options with the ability to allow saving settings in global or application 
specific profiles.

The second concern is about the D-Bus API. I hope that it will still be 
possible to get a fast in-application preview with it when using the native 
API.

For example, I love how the current Qt printing preview dialog just copies 
image pointers in the QtPrinter painting engine, so that the preview renders 
literally the same images as the application has in memory, without copying 
the actual data. The Qt printing preview is also very fast in scrolling and 
zooming, I doubt it would be possible with a program that effectively "just" 
tries to parse PostScript or PDF printer files just to generate the preview.

> Also on the agenda is integrated end-to-end Colour Management possibly
> using colord [4], something I know absolutly nothing about, so any
> feedback or suggestions people have on that will be very welcome.  For
> starters the dependencies for colord are glib and policykit.

Kai-Uwe Behrmann (maintainer of KDE color management applications) can 
help you here. Grab him on http://www.oyranos.org/ and make sure he attends 
the meeting ;)

Christoph Feck (kdepepo)