Hi,
over the last days I have tried to get the new print plug-in into a
state that is good enough for the 2.4 release. There are however still a
number of issues. I will paste from bug #387604 because it makes more
sense to discuss this here than in Bugzilla:
Three minor issues:
- It comes up in mm: seems like this should be inches (since other prefs, such
as resolution of the default new image and the units shown in the default grid
prefs are in inches), or at least that I should be able to change it to inches
and have it remember (it doesn't).
The dialog comes up with whatever unit is default for your locale. This is also
the behavior of the Print Size dialog in the core. So either that's fine
or we also need to change the way the core dialog works.
- The "Adjust Page Size and Orientation" button brings up a subdialog that
still calls itself "Page Setup".
The dialog title seems to be hardcoded in GTK+. I would very much
welcome if we could embed these widgets instead of having them in a
popup dialog. The dialog is even modal. There's supposedly an API to
make it asynchronous (gtk_print_run_page_setup_dialog_async). But since
changes in the dialog are only applied when the user presses the Apply
button and since this dismisses the dialog, I consider this API broken.
- In that subdialog, the default is "Any Printer (for portable documents)",
which seems strange since the default in the main tab is the system printer,
not print to file. Shouldn't the default in the subdialog be the printer that's
currently chosen.
Yes, indeed. I think it should do that. We should report this as a bug to GTK+.
More important (and perhaps related?) issues:
- The Page Setup dialog still chooses a page size of A4 every time even though
my system default is Letter and I've chosen Letter in past runs of the dialog.
This probably needs to be fixed in GTK+. Or someone who really
understands GtkPrint needs to have a look at our code and tell us what
we are doing wrong here.
- Clicking Print Preview still dismisses the dialog without doing anything.
It is supposed to call the default document viewer, which is evince on
my system. If that doesn't work for you, better file a bug report for it
against GTK+.
- Clicking Print seems to get stuck if the printer isn't on when I click it.
The progress bar goes to 100% and then stays there, and nothing shows up in the
print queue. Subsequently turning the printer on doesn't help. If the printer
is on when I click Print, it does eventually send something to the print queue
(though it takes a surprisingly long time, even for a small image in Draft
mode, compared to the gimp-print plug-in).
I have improved the status messages a little since you reported this.
Printing is still rather slow though. I am not sure if and how this can
be improved. Again, we seem to need advice from a GtkPrint expert here.
- When I print using this plug-in, I get periodic horizontal light bands. I'll
do more testing, but I think it's something this plug-in is doing (not a
clogged nozzle on my printer or similar issue) because I can print at different
scales and resolutions and the bands always show up at the same places relative
to the original image, regardless of physical spacing on the page.
Yes, the banding comes from the fact that the plug-in paints the image
in stripes of tile height. It does that to avoid having to allocate
memory for the whole image. I hope that we can find a way to fix this.
- If I print to file (PDF), I don't see the banding but I do see a spurious
edge effect: it looks like the leftmost few columns of pixels are duplicated
over on the right side of the image. I can attach a sample PDF if anyone wants
to see one.
________________________________________________________________________
I can't reproduce that.
Sven
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