Oi, I am Till Kamppeter, project leader and maintainer of linuxprinting.org and Foomatic. I am also developer for Printing and Digital Imaging at Mandriva in Paris. But I do not only work on the site and on Mandriva Linux, I am in general trying to make printing with free software better.
I am joining the GNOME usability list to discuss the printing dialog of GNOME. 10 days ago I have been on the OSDL Desktop Architects Meeting in Portland (http://groups.osdl.org/apps/group_public/download.php/1522/osdl_invite_L2_P7.pdf, http://kegel.com/osdl/da05.html, http://www.linuxprinting.org/till/dam2005/photos/) and there I have also talked about the printing problems. And we all were of the opinion that the GNOME printing dialog (and also the printing dialogs of Firefox and Thunderbird) needs improvement. We considered especially as the problems of GNOME's printing dialog that there is no access to the full feature set of the printer according to the PPD file used for the CUPS queue. Also pre-processing (N-Up, ...) and scheduling options (hold until 6pm, ...) of CUPS are not available in the GNOME dialog but they are available in the KDE dialog. Today I talked with Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer and desktop developer here at Mandriva, and David Barth, vice president for engineering, about the development of the printing dialogs in GNOME, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing than useful to the user. But on the other side the user wants to make use of the full functionality of his printer. He has payed for it. So I discussed with Frederic about possible solutions, especially about how to present the options in a better way. Suggestions are - Devide up the options in well-chosen groups - Make sure option names are always the same for options which do the same on printers from different manufacturers - Let option names and their I18N not come from the manufacturers but from a neutral usability team, so that they are optimized for usability and not for marketing - Assign images to these common option names (and also the appropriate choices) to make clear what the options mean, a picture tells more than a thousand words. - Set up a translation database which translates the manufacturer's option names to the common option names - Set up a database of usability ratings of options. Which ones are the most useful? Which ones cannot be left out because otherwise the printer is rendered unusable (or cannot be used for the task for which it is made for)? Which ones do rather confuse than help the user? Which ones are completely irrelevant in a Linux/Unix printing environment? These ratings will help to place the options in the dialog: Essential, important options should be directly visible, less important perhaps only in a sub dialog, which is opened by clicking an "Advanced Settings" button, or by switching the dialog into an "Expert Mode". So what do you think? I will also organize a Printing Summit in 2006 (most probably March, April or so) where desktop and usability will be one of the main subjects. There everyone who works on the developemnt of printing should meet. Not only driver and spooler developers should come, but also people working on printing integration in desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, ...) and document-producing applications (OOo, Scribus, KOffice, Firefox, ...) should participate. So I want to invite also people from the GNOME usability team and from GNOME printing to discuss the best way with other printing people. Probably this will help us to get onto the right way for an easy-to-use printing dialog also for feature-rich printers. Till _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
