On Wednesday 15 October 2008 21:17:46 John Layt wrote: > > Hi Anne, > > Sorry for the late reply, but I've been away on holiday. > And by this time I was away on holiday, too :-) > The print dialog is no longer provided by KDE and kprinter is no more :-(, > instead we use the Qt print dialog. I like some of the ideas in the new dialog, but I'm sad to see the baby going out with the bathwater. > This gives us cross-platform printing, > but means we are restricted to the features provided by Qt. So any bug > reports (if you are sure they are not app, distro or CUPS related) or > feature requests need to go to the Qt bug tracker rather than b.k.o. > I'll bear that in mind, thanks > One such missing feature is KDE no longer automatically saves the last used > printer settings for each application, it is now up to each app to save and > restore the settings, so needless to say I know of no KDE apps that do so > as yet (I'm planning a way of making this easier to do inside KDE, but I'll > also add it to my list of features to request from Qt). Also, if the app > keeps the same QPrinter instance to use each time the dialog is called, > then the settings will persist so long as the app is running, but again > most apps don't do this either. > Considering how important printing is to us, it does seem surprising that there is no concensus about what makes for ease of use. > There's two lots of settings, the CUPS settings and the application > settings. The stuff in the Properties/Advanced dialog are the CUPS settings > and it picks up whatever the defaults are in CUPS for the currently > selected printer instance. All the other settings in the main dialog and > the Properties/Page dialog are the sole responsibility of the app to set up > each time. > > As for brochure printing, there's no hope for that at the moment as Qt > doesn't appear keen on implementing post-filtering like kprinter did Hmm - lack of brochure printing is a serious problem. Enough to send some people scuttling back to M$Office :-( > and > there's no clever hack I can do to make it happen either. My personal > opinion is that this should be a feature provided by CUPS like n-up after > the app has created the print file. > > If you're looking for an easy way to 'persist' a set of CUPS settings for > an app or across all apps, I create multiple Instances within CUPS for my > printer with different sets of default settings, so I have one instance for > 'A4 Draft Grayscale' for most printing and another for '6x4 Colour Photo' > to print on the photo paper in the photo tray, etc. Then it's just a case > of selecting which printer Instance to print to in the dialog, no need to > mess with that awful Qt Properties/Advanced dialog. > I've done that in the past, and may do so again. It just feels like a work- around, clumsy. I really don't mind the new dialog so much, but I don't want to have to do that every time I print. It does sound as though there are some real difficulties here. Has anyone ever done in-depth study comparing persistent defaults with individual applications saving defaults? It sounds to me as though it's a real usability issue. > I'm not sure if you resolved your issues, but it does sound like an issue > between Qt and CUPS. Have you tried printing using a 'pure' Qt app like Qt > Assistant to see if it also has a problem? > I'll look into that, once I've caught up. Thanks for the explanations. Anne
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