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RE: [XaraXtreme-dev] Printing

Phil,

I think we are pretty limited with what we can do with libgnomeprintui
and note that it may not be available (at runtime). It has a whole
host of binary-bloating dependencies so I would not recommend static
linking (which would in any case require a substantial wxWidgets
change).

Personally I think we should avoid getting cute re the print dialog
until the gtk stuff is around - build on solid foundations, etc.

Alex

--On 20 June 2006 09:30 +0100 Phil Martin <Phil@xxxxxxxx> wrote:


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








Alex