[IAEP] OLPC in Science-Subjects --- NEED HELP!!!

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Johanna Wener's message of Thu May 12 21:08:31 +0200 2011:

> The big problem I have is, that everything that the children do on the olpc
> could not be used for learning because there is no way to print their works
> out.

I expect others to reply to the educational part of that sentence (i.e.
is there a better way to reach your goals than consuming lots of energy,
water and trees?).

> We tried to make a screenshot and send it by mail - doesnt work!

What exactly have you tried and how did it fail?

Walters brand-new Portfolio activity [1] has support for exporting
selected, annotated Journal entries as HTML. You could save it to a USB
stick, open the HTML file on a computer with an attached printer and
print from within the browser.

If you install CUPS on the system running Sugar (probably an XO judging
from the subject), you can use a browser other than Browse to print
locally. Or you can copy the Journal entry to the regular file system
using copy-to-journal and print using the "lpr" command from within
Terminal.

A whole bunch of other options would combine the following:

1. Acquiring a printable file:
   a) take a screenshot by pressing <Alt>+1
   b) some activities can export as PDF
   c) some activities can export as HTML
   d) some activities use a file format that can be read by non-Sugar
      applications (e.g. Write uses ODT, native file format of
      LibreOffice nee OpenOffice)
   e) Write 73 can export to PDF, so you could try using the clipboard
      to import content into Write and export as PDF

2. Transferring the file to Gnome or a different computer:
   a) copy to a USB stick, SD card or USB hard disk using the Journal
   b) using copy-from-journal from within Terminal to copy the Journal
      entry to the home directory (so Gnome can access it)
   c) using datastore-fuse [3] to access the Journal entry from within
      Gnome (experimental - you might need help from a techie)
   d) uploading the files to some web site (Moodle, wiki, photo
      gallery like Flickr, pastebin site, ...) and accessing that site
      from the computer with the printer.

3. Printing from within Gnome or on a different computer running a
   desktop system other than Sugar:
   a) for PDF and ODT just opening the file and printing from within the
      PDF viewer resp. word processor should usually work well enough.
   b) for HTML use a browser. You might need to tweak some options to
      get pretty output. I've seen browsers cutting a line of text in
      half; hopefully that's fixed by now.
   c) Gimp is pretty good for printing images, though it could be a bit
      overwhelming.
   d) CUPS understands several file formats natively (including images);
      just type "lpr name_of_the_file.jpg" (without the quotes).


I'd love to tell you to download the Print activity [2] and print
directly from within Sugar, but unfortunately I haven't managed to get
it to work yet. However, the above options hopefully get you unblocked
now; we can work on better solutions later.

Sascha

[1] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4437
[2] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-August/thread.html#18173
[3] http://git.sugarlabs.org/datastore-fuse
-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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