A Suggestion for KDEPrint

[Michael Goffioul]

Karl Scheel wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 
> Thanks for the prompt replies. :-*
> 
> Okay, I looked at escputil by typing "escputil -h" from a command line 
> shell; it appears to have almost everything that its Windows counterpart 
> has. I now would like answers to the following questions:
> 
>   1. Could it be invoked automatically whenever a job is sent to the
>      printer? This should be one of the side benefits of having
>      utilities such as escputil plug into KDEPrint.

No. What you have in KDEPrint is a GUI around escputil in the form
of a dialog with a couple of buttons to perform the tasks allowed
by the utility. You then get the result in a dialog box. If you
want to monitor the printing status, KDE integrates a job viewer
that is started automatically when you print from a KDE application.

>   2. The Windows equivalent has a nice graphical front end that pops-up
>      whenever a job is sent to the printer; it shows the amount of ink
>      available, and has a progress indicator. Although the command line
>      utilities will do the job, they appear so crude and archaic to
>      Windows users, and should therefore be avoided. Could graphical
>      front ends such as this be made available to plug-ins such as
>      escputil without their being dependant directly on the Qt libraries?

Once you deal with graphical interface, you have to use some toolkit.
Either Qt, GTK, or whatever else. So in all cases, you'll be dependent
on some existing toolkit. If the GUI is done for KDE, then you'll be
dependent on Qt. There's also the possibility to write a plain X11
interface, hence with no toolkit at all, but good luck...!
(unless you're satisfied with an interface like in xedit). Note that
Qt/KDE tries to keep binary compatibility has much as possible, and
source compatibility even more. But OK, Qt-1.2 is REALLY outdated.
Even then, I'm pretty sure that this utility could be ported to more
recent Qt version without too much effort, once you know the toolkit.

Michael.

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Michael Goffioul		IMEC-DESICS-MIRA
e-mail: goffioul at imec.be	(Mixed-Signal and RF Applications)
Tel:    +32/16/28-8510		Kapeldreef, 75
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