| Summary: | the usability of the print dialog could be enhanced | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Unmaintained] kdeprint | Reporter: | Cyrille Dunant <cyrille.dunant> |
| Component: | general | Assignee: | KDEPrint Devel Mailinglist <kde-print-devel> |
| Status: | RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED | ||
| Severity: | wishlist | CC: | jlayt |
| Priority: | NOR | ||
| Version: | unspecified | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Platform: | Compiled Sources | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: | ||
| Sentry Crash Report: | |||
| Attachments: |
a mockup to make clerer what I mean
A perhaps better mockup... another version... |
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Description
Cyrille Dunant
2005-08-05 13:26:42 UTC
Created attachment 12096 [details]
a mockup to make clerer what I mean
attached a mockup of the dialog...
Created attachment 12100 [details]
A perhaps better mockup...
Created attachment 12101 [details]
another version...
The last mockup looks very good, innovative but simple and usable. Why is the "Add printer" icon needed for? Adding printers should IMHO be done in the control center and not in the printing dialog itself. Jonas, in an office you might want to add a printer on-the-fly depending on which room you are currently in. It's very common for people to bring their laptops along all day through meetings, and rarely print from the same printer twice. *** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. *** I do not like the last mockup, but the second one looks pretty neat. Why not the last one? Because the buttons affecting the printer drop-down are visually placed next to a "number of copies" widget, suggesting they relate to that. That is confusing. Furthermore, I don't think the number of copies belongs in a simple print dialog. There is a very good interface for that in the expanded version of the dialog already. About the preview: it might be very cool to display it like this, but I doubt it would be feasable and functional: 1) the page images are too small to actually be able to see if the layout is correct, if there are no widows, etc. 2) actually laying out a document for printing is often not a quick process (AFAIK). The current method just needs to do that once, and only for the pages you actually print. However, the people who are actually knowledgable on this may disagree :-) This is true, printing means taking care of small details. But the print preview is still there for that. The idea of the mini-preview is getting an immediate sense of how many pages there are, and if the layout generally makes sense, as in, if it is a picture, is it a dot on the page or does it take up the space it should. Certainly this could be refined, though... The mockup looks good and you're right that the usability of the print dialog could be increases. However having the preview in the print dialog is currently impossible. Indeed this requires the print data, but 1) the print data are generated by the application, not by kdeprint 2) the print data are generated *after* the print dialog closes You can't have a preview in the print dialog without changing a large part of the internal print process. The "System Options" is to change the system-wide print settings (like the current CUPS server). The "Options" refers to print options to be applied to the current print job. These are different things, but a better wording could be used. Michael. Le Monday 08 August 2005 13.06, Michael Goffioul a écrit : [bugs.kde.org quoted mail] Too bad, then :) > the print data are generated by the application, not by kdeprint 2) the > print data are generated *after* the print dialog closes > You can't have a preview in the print dialog without changing a large part > of the internal print process. > > The "System Options" is to change the system-wide print settings (like the > current CUPS server). The "Options" refers to print options to be applied > to the current print job. These are different things, but a better wording > could be used. Yes. Still, for the user, it is probably reasonable to look for the "system options" in options. Which would remove a button which is useful, yes, but not so much that it should be seen always... Also, the other part of the mockup was that it is probably more useful to have the information related to the print job (number of pages, b/w, single-sided) rather than info about the printer. I was not terribly happy about the look of the mini-preview anyway, though -- a silly idea comes to mind, what if the _thumbnail_ (if a generator exists) was used ? Such a generator already exists, it's called ghostscript :-) Seriously, the problem is more how the whole stuff is processed. For the moment, you have to see it as an application using/controlling kdeprint and sends its print data to it when it decides to. To have thumbnails, you would need to have kdeprint controlling the application and requesting the print data. This new process would require large internal changes in kdeprint (and probably in applications as well). Michael. For your information: Bug 106512 also requests embedded print preview. KDEPrint is obsolete, unmaintained and will never be revived. Closing all open bugs. |