On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 23:22 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote: > Some fodder for discussion this weekend: > > 1. Is there a cross-platform printing user interface? > > Actually, what we are interested in is not the printing > user interface per-se, but the points of interaction between > the application user interface and the printing user - > what are the menu items? What are the places where the > application can extend the printing user interface? > > In terms of menu-items, Windows typically has: > > Page Setup > Print > > And sometimes "Print Preview". > > OS X has Page Setup and Print; Preview is a button on the > Print dialog. > > GNOME has Page Setup integrated into Print, though many > (most?) apps also have a separate Page Setup which may > or may not duplicate stuff from the print dialog.
I think "Page Setup", "Print Preview" & "Print" are best. Though "Print Preview" could be optional. For complex layout apps, you need to do "Page Setup" before editing the document (to set paper size/orientation/margins etc.), so putting it in the "Print" dialog seems a bit silly. Also, people tend to preview documents multiple times before printing, so it does seem to warrant its own menu item, at least for document- centric apps. Though for some applications you may need to configure the print options before printing (e.g. select a date range in a calendar to print), so a "Preview" button in the Print dialog makes sense in that case instead. > 5. Can we not use the native UI? > > If we write our own dialog, then we have to be able go > beyond enumerating printers, show printer specific options, > possibly with driver-provided UI, etc. It doesn't seem > that either windows or OS X has a "API for writing print > dialogs" > > I think trying to avoid the native UI is going to be a lot > harder for the print dialog than for the file chooser. > For the file chooser, we may be idiosynchratic, but there > is a lot of variability anyways (on Windows). For the > print dialog, we'll just be non-functional. If we use native UI, can we still customize the dialog? I guess it becomes harder to do. Ideally if we are using the same printer from Linux/Windows/OS X, we should be showing the same options from all of them. So I'd be tempted to use a GTK+ UI. Of course native Windows/OS X driver-provided UI may be better at the moment, but printer manufacturers could provide plugin GTK+ UI in future. Damon _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list