Re: Questions on printing
Patrick Wiseman wrote:
I'm going to snip a lot - I hope that doesn't offend someone's notion of
what's appropriate here. In particular, I'm snipping most of the KDE
stuff, as I don't use it.
On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Neal Lippman wrote:
On Monday 19 August 2002 14:14, Donald R. Spoon wrote:
Neal Lippman wrote:
The problem with piping the printing from various apps through kprinter is
that you wind up with two successive dialogs every time you go to print from
apps like Mozilla - the Mozilla provided dialog, followed by kprinter's
dialog. An advantage to piping through kprinter is, however, that you can
select various printers that kde understands, including cups, etc, in that
fashion.
So kprinter (a KDE app I presume) is obviously broken. With CUPS, you
just let apps print to where they want to print, whether it be lp or lpr.
Well it's not obvious to me. kprinter acts as a graphical front-end to
CUPS in the same way that qtcups or xpp do (though kprinter can act as a
front-end to other print systems too). The only thing "broken" about
kprinter or qtcups is actually a problem with other apps that throw in
useless print options that causes those two to balk. If you just use lpr
then you'll always be printing to your default printer, unless you can
find somewhere in that particular application's print dialog to specify
the printer. And countless other options like print quality, even/odd
page printing, colour/b&w, etc. can all be selected through kprinter. It
even gives you the option of printing to a fax modem, a postscript file
or a pdf. It is in some sense like the print dialog that pops up in
Windows when printing, one of the few things that Windows actually does
well.
What's really needed is for all apps to share a common print dialog
That's really not necessary - the "dialog" part, I mean - if your apps all
print somewhere plausible, CUPS handles it, if fully and properly
installed.
(And that "common" thing I'm sure sounds fine to those of you who use KDE
or GNOME, which provide all sorts of things in "common", but I use
neither, and am happy for my various apps to have their own
idiosyncracies.)
Well yes, CUPS handles it so long as you don't do anything other than
print to the default printer using default options. The point Neal and I
are making is that applications should be written with a print settings
control that you set once - specify the print command (lpr, kprinter,
qtcups, xpp, etc) and that is it. No application-specific dialogs to
worry about (or at least an option to turn them off). For example, to
save paper I often print on both sides which means I print odd and then
even pages. It is a lot less annoying just to always go to the same
place in kprinter to set that than to search around each different
application's dialog for that option, assuming it even exists.
--
David P. James
Ottawa, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
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