photo printing wizard

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Sunday 11 September 2005 20:27, Tobias Klein wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I've just wondered, if there's some kind of a photo printing wizard in KDE. 
> After searching a while I guess there isn't. Wouldn't it be a nice feature to 
> have something like that in the KDE Printing System? The wizard should offer 
> the following dialogues to the user:
> 
> - select the images you'd like to print
> - select the format and layout of the images (with displaying print preview)
> (yes, it would be similar to that one in win xp, but I think it's quite good)
> 
> Afterwards it should forward the users request to kprinter, where the user can 
> configure quality settings, the amount of pages to print, etc.
> 
> Is there already something in development?

Hi, Tobias,

I personally do not know much about this field (I do not even own a 
digicam).

But IIRC, there is something related to printing (a print wizard?) 
contained in digikam, digikam-plugins or kipi (the common plugin
structure for digikam, gwenview, kimdaba and showimg).

You may want to conduct a more detailed search for KDE-related 
applications on www.kde-apps.org.

A non-KDE applications that may do s.th. like you want certainly is 
flphoto (http://www.easysw.com/~mike/flphoto/), written by Mike Sweet, 
also author of CUPS. (It is also contained on the SUSE+Mandriva 
installation media, and other distros too.)


A more general comment re. KDEPrint:

KDEPrint is a GUI fronted to other, external applications. It doesnt
currently do any significant printfile processing itself. Its GUI is
here to spare the user from learning, using and memorizing complicated 
command lines.

This architecture was picked deliberately, back in the days it was
designed. I do not see this change anytime soon.

So it is probably a good idea to contact the digikam developers and
ask there. kprinter certainly is able to let customized elements
appear in its interface, if it is called from digikam or other photo
processing software. It does so already for Konqueror ("HTML Settings"), 
Kate ("Text Settings", "Header+Footer", "Layout") and a few other 
applications.


To summarize,

yes, it would be nice to have a Photo Printing Wizard in KDE. Yes, it
should be a separate application from KDEPrint. Yes, there would be
a nice way to plug in its interface into kprinter. Maybe, there is a
beginning for this already there in the camp of the digikam, kimdaba,
gwenview or showimg developers.

Are you yourself interested in starting or joining such a development?

> Greets, Tobias.

Cheers,
Kurt