Version: 1.3.0_devel (using KDE 3.4.0, compiled sources) Compiler: gcc version 3.4.3 OS: SunOS (sun4u) release 5.8 Very often, users will be analyzing data from a given file (or set of files), and may want to print their kst session out to paper (or to file) to show other people, or for archival. The problem with the current situation is that unless you take extra care to add filenames and other context information manually in your plot and update them when required, you will no longer be able to know the context a few days later. And this is quite tedious as long as there is no implementation of strings/scalars from datasource metadata and when plot layout touches labels each time it is changed... For that reason, it would be very useful if customizable header/footer fields were added to the print dialog. They should allow to enter strings and interpret existing vars just as for labels (with some special fields like [Date] [Time] [User] etc, which probably won't be proper kst strings or scalars, but will allow to preserve the current functionality). Implementation suggestion: I imagine something like two checkboxes ("Add header" and "Add footer") instead of the existing "Add plot information to each page", with a "Configure..." button to their right that would actually call the current label dialog. But I don't know whether that's technically easy to implement.
Any chance to see that implemented in the short term (and of course in kst2) ? I have colleagues here who use kst more and more but complain that their piles of printouts quickly become indistinguishable because it is so hard to put metadata on the pages. When you're looking at the data on-screen, you can know where they come from with the data manager. But once it's printed, that context information is gone forever.
Note that this may be obsoleted if the new wish I have just created (bug #157791) were to be implemented, even though it could be interesting to add printing-specific data. But the other approach is more generic and better IMHO for the real issue (being able to identify what you're looking at among a pile of plots a few months from now, without having to input all that text and do the layout by hand)
This has been made obsolete by the implementation of #157791.