[Development] [Interest] Printer-specific options in Qt5's print dialog (Linux, CUPS)

[Michael Weghorn]

Thank you very much for your reply.

On 2017-01-31 08:04, Andrew, Shaw wrote:

> 
>     > 2) Is the Qt project interested in us working together with them 
> to get
>     > the feature implemented upstream?
> 
> I would be willing to look at the changes and review them, I am sure
> there are others out there too who would be willing too.

Thank you, that is great.

> 
>     > 3) Is a temporary implementation as described above considered as 
> a good
>     > approach for now?
> 
> To be honest I am not entirely sure, I personally would be in favour
> of implementing it the right way the first time if it is going to go
> into Qt rather than having a stop-gap solution. There is nothing to
> gain I think from an intermediate solution, though if you are
> referring to doing it in your own code then it is probably ideal for
> the short-term.

We are definitely also interested in doing it the right way and would 
very much like an implementation that is sustainable and fits into Qt's 
strategy and plans for the print module.
As I tried to describe in my previous email, my problem here is that I 
currently do not really know what would be the "right way" to do such an 
implementation. My current understanding of the desired future print 
system in Qt is still too vague to be able to estimate that 
appropriately. The links about the plans for the Qt print system that 
John provided in his email [1] give some kind of overview, but are 
currently not enough for me to deduce the concrete next steps that need 
to be taken for the implementation.

If you (or somebody else) can give more information on that, this is 
certainly something we would be happy about and that we will examine 
more closely.


> 
> Personally I would go ahead and submit what you have then we can at
> least look at the code and take anything further from there in that
> respect. As for the overall direction of the printing module this
> would probably be a good place to discuss that.

We currently don't have a finished implementation. In case you can give 
further hints on what a "desirable" implementation could look like, we 
would like to take that into account from the beginning. Otherwise, we 
(or a contractor) might possibly start working on an implementation 
similar to how it was done in Qt 4 (for now).

The old implementation used CUPS' PPD API which has been deprecated for 
a while [2]. So far, I could not really find out how to handle all 
printer-specific options using the recommended Job Ticket APIs instead, 
but I asked on CUPS' mailing list today and will try to use the "right" 
solution in that place from the beginning.


Michael

[1] 
http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/2015-September/018700.html
[2] https://www.cups.org/doc/api-ppd.html
[3] http://lists.cups.org/pipermail/cups/2017-January/028192.html