| Summary: | No KPrinter Print Preview Option | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Unmaintained] kdelibs | Reporter: | Martin L ü c h e m <Heinrich20> |
| Component: | print-dialog | Assignee: | KDEPrint Devel Mailinglist <kde-print-devel> |
| Status: | RESOLVED NOT A BUG | ||
| Severity: | wishlist | CC: | jlayt |
| Priority: | NOR | ||
| Version: | unspecified | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Platform: | Debian testing | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: | ||
| Sentry Crash Report: | |||
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Description
Martin L ü c h e m
2009-12-21 11:09:50 UTC
KPrinter no longer exists in KDE4. Oha! And can I ask you: Where did the functionality like print preview go? Thank you, Martin It is now up to each individual app to enable the Print Preview in the File menu. Most app developers missed that they need to do this themselves. If you notice an app that has Print but not Print Preview, then raise a bug against that individual app. You can point them towards the porting instruction number 5) at http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDEPrint/KDE4, or to the class doco at http://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-apidocs/kutils/html/classKPrintPreview.html, or use okular or korganizer as an example. For most it would be 10 minutes work. Too bad! You remove all the advantages of KPrinter - a pity! Tomorrow probably everything works like on windows... :-( Martin Hey Martin, thanks for your encouraging and constructive comments, things like that make all developers proud to work for free in dates like the ones we are in now so we can make people like you happy. Hey Albert, sorry about that but this is exactly what I realize: Functionality vanishes. This is not the only example between KDE 3.5 and KDE 4! I do not see the positive thing in giving this up. This more or less leads to the behaviour of programs like open office. For sure this has to do with the platform as well but I do not understand why therefor the opportunity of print preview has do be eliminated. Have a good time! Martin A more polite and useful response would have been to ask why it was removed from the Print Dialog. Note Print Preview is still available, the app just needs to add the File menu entry. For a start, we switched print engines to Qt for various reasons (mostly because it worked and KDEPrint didn't) and Qt has separate Print and Print Preview options and doesn't make Print Preview available through the Print Dialog. There are actually good usability reasons for this. Firstly, it isn't immediately obvious to less advanced users that you should choose Print to get to Print Preview (like in Windows choosing Start to Shutdown). Also, the Print Preview cannot apply all the options available in the Print Dialog (e.g. stuff done by the CUPS print server and the printer itself) which is confusing to users when the Preview shows something different to what they have selected. Yes it would be convenient to also have a Preview button in the dialog, but other issues in Qt printing need to be solved first (e.g. odd/even pages, page ranges, save settings, etc), then other problems need to be sorted out lower in the printing stack (CUPS getting a preview interface, etc), and there are long-term plans to embed a preview in the print dialog that responds to changes the user makes (the OpenPrinting project). Hi, thank you for the detailed answer. I wrote a proposal for a change: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=113&t=84727 My idea would be to combine the advantages of having a print preview on both parts, either within the file menu of the application or the printing dialog. Technically this should not make any difference and it would fulfill the needs of different users. Additional comment: I am looking at this primarily from the users sight not from the technical one. Regards, Martin |