Thu 26 Jan 2006
Looks like my notebook works well with suspend once I did a modprobe -r button. Before it would suspend just fine but upon coming back up it would instantly shut itself off. Jeremy says there is a fix in the works and for right now I can work around the issue by having the suspend scripts unload and load the button module. This is great because my use case is to shut the lid, driver 40 minutes home and open it up. As an experiment I suspended my book at work and unplugged the power. Upon coming back the next morning only one quarter of the battery was used. Jeremy said this is a dismal showing and we could do much better but hey it satisfies my needs. Roughly two days of standby time is fine with me.
Printing
While Alex Larson has been working on the high level API for printing in Gtk+, I have been looking at the print dialog.
I am basing it off of what was drawn up at the Boston Summit and the discussion that followed in various forums. Right now it isn’t much to look at because I have been concentrating on the backend infrastructure. I am working on hooking up a CUPS ipp backend which is largely based off of libgnomecups. The difference is where libgnomecups uses threads to accomplish nonblocking I/O, I am trying to do it with a GSource. It is pretty painful to say the least but fun none the less. As soon as I can get that working I’m going to land it in Gnome CVS.
January 26th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Awesome. This is a great feature in Macs that I find amazing it took so long for other people to copy.
January 27th, 2006 at 12:51 am
This sounds the same as a problem we have in Mandriva - logged in our Bugzilla here: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=18998 . Is there a bug report for RH so we could synchronise on this issue? Thanks!
January 27th, 2006 at 4:23 am
If you’re going for such a tiny dialog, could you make it a tad bigger and add options for print to pdf, and integrated preview?
Having those + your proposal would rock
January 27th, 2006 at 5:22 am
At first sight the line saying: “Settings: Default” doesn’t give me any clue what kind of settings (I guess it does not to include which printer and how many copies of which pages my printer should print).
Although I could live with it, some UI to easily discover what all of these settings are would be nice. Additionally you could somehow summarize the most important settings on the main dialog like: color, papersize, two sided and (on printers that support it) the input and output selections.
January 27th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Kudos for working on this, this kind of work has been needed for a long time.
January 27th, 2006 at 9:22 am
Your print dialog looks promising. It’s lacking one important thing tough - the odd/even/all pages selection. It’s necessary to print double-sided documents.
January 27th, 2006 at 9:30 am
RubenV and Bram,
As I said right now it is just a simple dialog so I can get the backend going and start hooking it up to what Alex is doing. We still need to put the most common options on the front along with things like preview for apps that support it. There are plans for a pdf (write to file) backend and perhaps an e-mail and fax backend.
As for settings, the default settings are whatever are default for that printer and document (Documents can embed printer settings if the app supports it). The rest of the settings are like bookmarks. A user can setup common settings they use and give them names like “A4 Color”. This makes it easy for a person to switch quickly.
January 27th, 2006 at 9:38 am
I think the print dialog should have a text field instead of the “from” “to” boxes, like “Pages:” “1,4,5-10,23″. A tad more advanced perhaps, but at the same time this is functionality people would require imho.
January 27th, 2006 at 10:02 am
“Send to”? Shouldn’t that be “Print with” or the like?
- Chris
January 27th, 2006 at 11:54 am
Kristian,
Not for the default view. Perhaps there should be a way to define this but it makes it confusing for the common case.
Chris,
You don’t actually print files, you send them to be printed. In some cases you might send it to a file, e-mail or fax.
January 27th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Looks great. Only one minor flaw.
The text labels should be “Right Aligned” if this print dialog is to follow the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines. (Sure you could claim this was an exception but there are massive exceptions so big you could drive a truck through them.)
January 27th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
AdamW,
The workaround in fedora is to remove and readd the button module in our scripts but there is a fix going into the kernel but it apparently won’t land upstream until at least 2.6.17. Apparently the real fix is hard.
January 27th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Alan,
Yep, a HIG review would happen later down the line. Also once I land it in CVS hopefully people will start to send patches.
January 27th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Yep, even/odd page selection missing also was my concern when I saw the dialog. So I made up this: http://taschenorakel.de/mathias/tmp/print-mockup.png
Well, but yes: Really important stuff you are working on.
January 27th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
The dialog looks, nice and sleek.
But I believe something like tbf’s mockup is necessary for odd/even page printing.
Haven’t thought of checkboxes for it before, but now that I think of it, its clean and simple.
January 27th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
All the best for the print dialog rewrite.
January 28th, 2006 at 11:58 am
Does the work on a GTK printing system seems to dulplicate a lot of the work done on gnome-print. Does this mean that gnome-print is now dead? Or will I have to put up with *another* set of printing dial boxes on my desktop–GTK apps, Gnome apps and OpenOffice.org?
January 29th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
Sam,
Gnome libraries are going away for the most part. They don’t present a stable ISV story. Gtk+ does and everything that makes sense to move to Gtk+ is being moved. The print dialog is one of them. One of the goals of the new API is to be able to integrate into OO.org, firefox and the like. The API is also being designed as cross platform so on Windows you will see a window print dialog and on mac you will see an OS X print dialog.
January 30th, 2006 at 7:34 am
This would appear to be an implementation detail. Using the print dialogue to fax things would also appear to be a limitation of the implementation.
- Chris