[Development] qt and printing

[John Layt]

On Friday 17 Feb 2012 15:28:49 Francesco R. wrote:

> Could you (as somebody involved in qt5 planning or development)  clarify
> what the plan are for printing functionality, managment or whatever?

Hi Francesco,

I'm the new community maintainer for printing support in Qt, so I can fill you 
in on some of my plans.  You can find a more detailed description on my blog 
at http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/kf5_localization_and_printing_plans

As Lars has explained, the Qt4 print module has been cleaned up a little in 
Qt5 but we do not plan to add any new features to this code in the future.  
Instead we are planning a new module for 5.1 or 5.2 that conforms to modern 
printing standards and features.  However that is a long time for KDE4 apps to 
wait for the missing features and bug fixes.

My current work plan is to complete the last few localisation features needed 
for Qt 5.0, then to move on to a bug triage on the QPrintSupport module to get 
it ready for 5.0.  The bug fixes here will where possible be back-ported to Qt 
4.8.  For example, I really want to get the CUPS settings bug fixes in to 4.8.

Once that work is done, I plan to fork off a Qt4 version of QPrintSupport and 
apply on top of it my old patches for adding many of the currently missing 
features.  Once that is stabilised I'll release it as an interim experimental 
print library that KDE4 apps can use if they want.

>From there I plan to start working on the new print module, which we will hold 
design session for at the next Qt Contributors Summit.  Hopefully it will be 
ready for Qt 5.1 and so the first full release of KDE Frameworks 5.

I hope that answers a few of your questions.

Cheers!

John.