SUMMARY The selection tool offers the ability to save or copy parts of the sheet as a picture. It would be very helpful to have a third option sending the cutout strait to the printing system. I frequently deal with architectural plans and I need a printout of just a few rooms, not the whole plan. In acroread this is very simple: You just zoom in and print the current window. In okular there is no easy way, however, it could be even better by having an extra option in the selection tool.
Nice idea, I could imagine similar use cases. How do you imagine the exact behaviour? Do you need original size or a zoom to the selection? What if the selection goes across multiple pages? I think it would make sense to just open the print dialog, with sensible values set to Pages and Margins. Unfortunately, the print dialog has no Margins option. That could be bypassed by temporarily covering the other areas with white rectange annotations. (I’m not optimistic that this will be accepted, but the benchmark is “Speak Text”. ;) )
In my case it depends on the situation. Sometimes it should be in original size, sometimes zoomed to double or half. I could imagine using the zoom in okular for that. There you can decide between 100% or 200% or whatever. Then you select a certain part by the selection tool and instead of copy or save you start something like "print section" which leads to the print dialog. Another possibility is your idea (as far as I understood): Use the selection tool to choose an area. Start the print dialog by the context menu, which needs some aditionals at PDF-Options, like: "fit to printer margins" or "zoom xx %" Unfortunately both solutions have the disadvantage, that you don't know if it is larger than a single page or if you waste space. Concearning "accross multipe pages" I don't see any trouble as the selection tool only accepts selections on a single page.
Relevant context is that architectural plans often have page sizes far above A4 or whatever you have in your printer, correct? Printing a specific section at a specific zoom is at least confusing. Look at the PDF options tab. It lets you choose from: * Fit to full page (Actually means “Fit to paper size”, but what is fitted? The whole page, or the graphical content?) * Fit to printable area (Same question) * None, original scale I think you need an actual zoom control for 100%, 200%, ... Using the current display zoom feels weird to me.
Exactly. Most architectural plans are large (A2 or A1), but often I need just a small pice printed on an A4 page. So the first goal would be to print just an area of the plan. The second goal would be to have a zoomed printout. Sometimes the original size is scaled 1:100 and therefore rather small in original size. So enlarging it to 1:50 by zooming to 200 % would be great. About the printing options: I suppose you quoted them for example as they depend on what cups supplies and vary a lot. Using the display zoom is weird and doesen't sound logic especially in okular. It would be a workaround to avoid an extra control in the print dialog -> pdf-options. (Actually in acroread I do it that way: I zoom the display to 200%, reduce the size of the display-window so only the needed section fixes in. Start the print dialog and print the current view. But of course in acroread there is no way to select an aria like okular can do.) To avoid confusion I think having a zoom control in the pdf-options would be best. But still there is the difficulty that you don't know if your desire fits on a single page or if the printer driver splits it on several. An elegant way to salve this would be a preview in the print dialog, but I guess that would be over the top...