[Foomatic] Printer driver UI [proposal]

[Robert L Krawitz]

   Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 15:55:51 +0100 (CET)
   From: Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.de>

   > Many of those driver options will probably never be used by a
   > normal user so it's not needed to show them in all cases.

   Then hide them in a low level option group or in a sub-group.

   See how Till it has made for the *PrintoutMode option for Foomatic 3.x

The PrintoutMode is basically just a bundle of {option, value} pairs.
The problem that Michael (and Chema, and I) are talking about is that
a lot of these options either can't be expressed at all (such as
curves) in a PPD file, or require really nasty hacks (such as floating
point values within a range).

   If you need data it must be in the PPD file in a 100% compliant
   way to the PPD specification.
   This is no problem as you can introduce as many main keywords
   and option keywords as you like.

It is a problem, because many of these settings aren't of the form
"choose one option from a list".  For example, a bounded floating
point number, while scalar, is really selected as a point along a
line.  It's possible to do something like this with option keywords,
but it's very restrictive (the Gimp-print CUPS driver only permits
values spaced 0.05 apart, which is a fairly wide gap), and the
presentation is really ugly.  Other data types, such as curves, simply
aren't scalar values at all.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton