RE: [XaraXtreme-dev] Printing

["Phil Martin" <Phil@xxxxxxxx>]

As I remember it the Windows Print dialog was designed with these things
in mind:
* At the time screen space was much less than today so it was designed
to be compact.
* Present the user with just the most common variables, summarise the
remaining state and provide means of changing that state through
satellite dialogs.
* We were unable to customise the standard Windows Print dialog to do
these things so we created our own.

With some tweaks, the gnomeprintui dialog could serve as a "Print
Settings" dialog for a revised version of Camelot's existing Print
dialog. That would have the following advantages:
* It's close to the current Windows print UI design.
* It remains constant across platforms because the main Print dialog is
our dialog not a library's.
* It summarises numerous settings rather than presenting them all to the
user at once.
* It's easy for us to configure the Print dialog design exactly how we
want.
* It could be made acceptable to Mac users.

If we use gnomeprintui as is, then I suggest we would want the
gnomeprintui dialog to default to showing the "Job" tab. It's a shame
that the user would have to look at the other tabs to check that their
settings are OK - there's no summary. The layout of the "Job" tab is
horrible and ideally we should tweak it - and we may need to add more
controls.

Phil

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:owner-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alex Bligh
> Sent: 19 June 2006 18:22
> To: xara-dev
> Cc: Alex Bligh
> Subject: [XaraXtreme-dev] Printing
> 
> I have jotted down some of my initial thoughts about printing 
> and the printing UI here:
> http://www.xaraxtreme.org/developers/documentation/xaralx_prin
> ting_alternatives.html
> 
> I would appreciate some feedback, particularly on the UI 
> bits, and on the area of when Postscript printing needs to 
> use OSRenderRegion.
> 
> Alex
>