[Okular-devel] [Bug 190497] okular: print menu items are disabled in windows

[John Layt]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190497


John Layt <jlayt at kde.org> changed:

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                 CC|                            |jlayt at kde.org




--- Comment #8 from John Layt <jlayt kde org>  2011-08-21 08:22:37 ---
Let me give some background.  A conscious decision was made by Okular that they
wanted the highest possible quality print-outs of PDF's, so painting the PDF
onto a QPrinter is not an option as the quality is massively degraded. 
Printing degraded quality documents is considered worse for Okular's reputation
than not printing at all.

Instead Okular passes the PDF file directly to the print system to use via the
CUPS/lpr command line call.  Unfortunately this is a model that doesn't work on
Windows as the Windows Print System doesn't provide a tool to print files
directly.  Basically all we need is a windows command line tool that can take a
ps/pdf and translate it to GDI without degrading the quality and print it
without showing a print dialog.

The one option I know of is Ghostscript which provides this.  PDFCreator
mentioned above doesn't seem to provide this?   So the obvious question is if
the Windows team think it would be acceptable to make gs a hard dependency for
Okular on Windows.  GS looks to be a 12Mb binary download on Windows.  If so it
shouldn't take much work to add the gs command line call to FilePrinter, but I
would need to do more research on how gs and printer drivers interact as you
seem to need to tell it what driver to use.

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