Printing summit

[Josef Spillner (kde-travel)]

Am Mittwoch, 25. Oktober 2006 05:21 schrieben Sie:
> I'm the current maintainer of the kdeprint suite (libs and apps). I'm
> _trying to_ work as actively as possible on the code. But not being in any
> way able to spend more than meager personal time on KDE (day work
> completely unrelated), I need as much help as I can get.

Cool. Can you please add yourself as @maintainer to the doxygen comments of 
kprinter.h and such?

> I was at the last summit (in April). I can't be there this time because I
> give a course this autumn. There were crucial discussions last time that
> will be followed up at this summit for sure. The topic that is central from
> KDE's view point is the description of a common (?) printing dialog design.
> Ellen Reitmeyr and Jan Muehlig from OpenUsability together with Celeste
> Paul had worked on this for the last six months and I guess at this time
> they will have results.

The dialog has been drafted on paper/blackboard. There will be some base 
designs depending on what the user expectations are (depending on the printer 
model), but I'm sure the usability guys will blog/report on this in detail.
There is a wiki page, I don't currently have the URL.

For the implementation, I'm going to propose a priority-based automatic 
placement system for widgets. It's independent of the domain it is used in 
(printer dialogs being one of them) and I consider such a system to be 
crucial in order to achieve what the usability mockups propose: a printer 
dialog where the placement of the options might be influenced by the driver 
and by the applications.

The current implemention is a Qt-only thingie but I only started it yesterday. 
Not sure how fast I'll be able to demonstrate progress.

One potential point of conflict is that we need some dialog improvements 
rapidly, hopefully for KDE 4 and also an API for portland, whereas the 
usability efforts are rather long-term and need user testing before they can 
result in a final design.

> Our central plans for the next period are:
> - porting KDEPrint (from 3.5.5 branch) to CUPS-1.3 completely (partially
> done by Dirk Mueller and others);
> - bringing KDEPrint up to due level in KDE-4.0 and then start implementing
> what I call "version two" of the KDEPrint platform, with more support for
> electronic printing (PDF etc.) and improved usability.

I see. There are some detail improvements I can think of but other than that 
I'm going to limit myself to the printer dialog GUI.

> Thus, we are interested in everything related to CUPS advancements and to
> printing through PDF.

Printing through PDF is supposed to go away from the GUI and move into "save 
as" or "export to" dialog options, if I understood the plans correctly. But 
it cannot be done right now so that all applications can keep this 
functionality.

> Apart of this, the biggest question remaining, for which I look for answers
> everywhere, is how to coopt more people in the printing development.

Good question. I'm merely sitting on the sidelines. It really takes people who 
are actually dealing with printer stuff on a daily basis or are involved with 
such people in organisations like FSG or PWG to steer efforts. But those 
people shouldn't have to do all the coding work - there's too much of it to 
do.

There are long-term plans to move away from PPD towards UPDF or other such 
formats and they're going to improve the presentation of printer capabilities 
to the user. Talking to a scanner (SANE) developer, they're already on such a 
level and therefore it's easier for them to dynamically create the GUI.
I'm going to keep an eye on them but at least for now the implementation will 
have to live with PPD.

The FSG meeting has now ended and the PWG meeting begun, I'm going to follow 
up on that soon.

Josef