[Interest] Qt 5 Printer-specific options in QPrintDialog (Linux, CUPS)

[Michael Weghorn]

Hi John,

thank you once again. Those hints are certainly of help and I will have
a closer look at the resources.

I cannot say yet how I will continue with this for now.
KDE 5 is currently not a very urgent topic for us at work. Our
internally used Linux distribution is based on Ubuntu LTS and we are
possibly going to skip Ubuntu 16.04 - which means that the big switch to
KDE 5 would only take place for us in the Ubuntu 18.04 based version.

Some of the problems with the Qt 4 print dialog will probably have to be
addressed sooner. As that part of the Qt 4 print dialog has no future
(because it was removed in Qt 5), I want to avoid putting too much time
and effort into it. Therefore, ugly hacks or workarounds that we use
only internally might be an option.

However, I am very interested in a good and clean solution in Qt 5.
In case I see what needs to be done there and I find the time, I might
consider to contribute a bit. And I am aware that the urgency for others
might be higher than it currently is for us.


Kind regards,
Michael

On 11/09/15 16:47, John Layt wrote:
> On 11 September 2015 at 13:37, Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn at posteo.de> wrote:
> 
>> thank you very much for the quick reply.
> 
> No problem, was lazily checking my mail on a Friday afternoon as I
> wind down at work... :-)
> 
>> I estimate it quite a big issue in the migration to KDE 5/Qt 5 for us if
>> all those printer-specific options cannot be set any more.
> 
> Yes, it's an issue for us inside KDE too, which is why I feel bad
> about it stalling :-( I'm not sure we can even use the hack we used in
> KDE4 anymore, where we inserted our own CUPS settings into the model
> so they would be applied.
> 
>> In case we/I might consider contributing to a reimplementation:
>> Have you already started making thoughts of how to implement it or maybe
>> even started?
>> In case any resources are available (git branch,...) I would be very
>> glad to get more information.
> 
> Given the dependency tree of new features required to reach the end
> point, a temporary implementation might be a better bet than waiting
> for the new print system, i.e. reimplement the old extra page but
> smarter. The main problem with the old page was it duplicated settings
> from the main dialog, and hid the fact you could actually edit the
> values. The UX I had in mind for Qt4 was to choose all the features
> that could be supported directly in the main dialog and add them
> there, then filter those out in the extra page in a generic editing
> view. It would require a lot of work around parsing PPD's and matching
> option codes to existing ui, but it's doable.
> 
> For working on the new print system backend and dialog, unfortunately
> most of the details reside in my head, but there's a rough outline at:
> 
>  * https://wiki.qt.io/Qt-5-QtPrint
>  * https://wiki.qt.io/Qt-contributors-summit-2014-QtPrintSupport
> * http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2014-January/014919.html
> 
> The main code lives in qtbase:
> 
> * qtbase/src/printsupport
> * qtbase/src/plugins/printsupport
> 
> In particular the CUPS print dialog is at
> 
> * qtbase/src/printsupport/dialogs/qprintdialog_unix.cpp
> 
> I have various experimental branches on my hard drive and previously
> on Gitorious, but nothing progressed enough to really push anywhere
> though, but I'll try have a poke around this weekend to see if there's
> something useful.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> John.
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