[kde-linux] KWrite/printer problem

[Bruce Miller]

Comments are bottom-posted

 --
Bruce Miller, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
bruce at brmiller.ca; (613) 745-1151


No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.



----- Original Message ----
> From: Steven Friedrich <freebsd at insightbb.com>
> To: kde-linux at kde.org
> Cc: jim <jimtrish at att.net>
> Sent: Wed, October 7, 2009 10:40:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [kde-linux] KWrite/printer problem
> 
> On Wednesday 07 October 2009 12:59:51 jim wrote:
> > On Tue, 6 Oct 2009 22:10:21 +0100 Anne Wilson wrote:
> > >As for the comment about no-one caring about losing lines - that's about
> > > as silly as it can get, and not worthy of a reply.
> > 
> > Maybe not, can you do me a favour? Compose a text file similar to
> > ''Line 1", "Line 2", etc. for a total of approximately 70 lines.
> >  Save it and then load it into KWrite and print it. The type of printer
> > should not matter. Let me know if all the lines and headers/footers
> > are printed correctly.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Jim Phelps
> 
> I had an issue with CUPS, but I resolved that.
> 
> So then I had time to check kde3 vs kde4.
> 
> Under KDE4, when I print the file without headers and footers, no lines are 
> missing, but when I print it with a header and no footer, the header causes 
> lines to extend into the bottom margin and there is no header on the second 
> page. Line 56 is missing and Line 57 is in the top margin of page 2.
> 
> KDE3 worked correctly, that is, it printed the header, recognizing the top 
> margin, then printed the body lines 1-54, a blank line(this might be a bug), 
> and then the footer, respecting the bottom margin.
> 
> In short, it appears than when headers or footers are used under kde4, their 
> size doesn't get subtracted from the page when it calculates the room for the 
> body.

This note updates my earlier contribution to this thread.

Late this evening, I checked the default printer settings under Kubuntu's "System Settings." This is Kubuntu's substitute for the KDE Control Centre. The default printer margins were set to the traditional maximum imageable area for HP LaserJets (at least for the older ones; I am less familiar with the most modern ones). This is 0.5" (12.7mm) top and bottom and 0.25" (6.4mm) left and right. I altered these to slightly larger margins all round.

I then tried starting Konqueror and printing two text documents from Wikipedia; I used the "printer-friendly" versions of both articles.

Several observations:
1. the Printer Properties dialogue in the KDE print engine (at least when Konqueror called it) did not respect the default margins which I had just changed.
2. the units of measure for the margins default to metric, rather than to the user's system default. I was raised to be "bilingual" (bisystemic?) between Imperial and SI measure , but for some, that might be a bother. Were I outside North America, I would use SI, including SI paper sizes. But here in North America, we use distinctive paper sizes and Imperial measure (or at least that's what we call it north of the Canada / US border and we have bigger gallons than they do, which only goes to prove that not everything in the USA is the biggest in the world <grin>).
3. printing with the current KDE printer engine is still an all-or-nothing proposition. There is no way to define a print range. This would be a real bore if one wanted to print, say, only one page out of a 100-page document.
4. There is no way to customize a Konqueror print header. It is hard-coded.
5. Don't bother looking for footers in Konqueror. They don't exist.
6. My two texts, one quite long, printed without error. Konqueror always broke the page at the end of a paragraph. I checked all 15 pages of output carefully: there was no missing text.
7. However, a long table caused a train wreck. In the document http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RAID&printable=yes there is a long table which begins on page 3. This table did not print on page 3; it was superimposed (subimposed?) on page 4. This was not a paper jam, it was a rendering engine failure.

Conclusions:
1. The lateness of the hour here in eastern Canada (and the length of my day) did not allow me to test Konqueror in a plain vanilla form, that is, without changing any of its default margins. However, after a change to the margins, documents printed without text being lost at the page breaks. This was the problem that has driven me crazy for the last two years and which led another user to start this thread.
2. The problem rendering the table (point 7 above) suggests that the KDE print engine still needs considerable work.
3. The lack of a function for printing only a part of, rather than an entire, document is an important hole in KDE's overall functionality
4. It is my personal judgement --- others will obviously have different perspectives --- that the persistent problems with printing in KDE4 are the most important outstanding regression in end-user usefulness from KDE3.5 to KDE4. kprinter used to be a gem of KDE. I have read that it was becoming beastly to maintain, but it remains a shame to have lost it. I need to put on an asbestos suit to say this, but in my view, the best currently available printer control software that I know of is FinePrint and it is (gasp!) commercial software for Windows.