[Sugar-devel] Print Support (journal vs activity)

[Sascha Silbe]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 05:56:59PM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

>> I think we should solve our printing problem by extending this list 
>> to a
>> few more common formats.  Add in python source and the Open Document
>> Format, and we're pretty much done.  There are very few Activities 
>> that
>> generate documents that could be printed, but are not in one of these
>> formats.  Those Activities will have to gain the ability to export 
>> to one
>> of the supported formats, just as they would on any standard linux 
>> desktop.
> That's all fine, if the user sends a file to the printer spool, it
> gets converted to a printable format, then sent to print. That's how
> printing in unix works and there's no need to change it.
What I don't like about this option is that the _print_ _server_ decides 
how the printed out document actually looks like. Font family, font 
size, word wrapping, even what gets put on which page (due to page 
length and font size) and especially advanced formatting like syntax 
highlighting is all undefined. You will get different results depending 
on whether you use the XS at school, the printer with direct network 
interface (e.g. HP JetDirect) at home or a printer connected to a 
Windows machine (IIRC current Windows versions have IPP server support) 
at your friends.

PDF and Postscript are bad enough: I've been responsible for 
administering the computer pools including the printers at our 
department for several years and saw how documents printed fine on one 
printer and came out rubbish on another. And that wasn't without 
explicit intention - PostScript is a full programming language and you 
can show entirely different things on screen and on the printed page (a 
good friend of mine - Caspar - once had a document which showed 
additional text on the printout about not being allowed to be printed).

I was told by the head administrator of the archive of our university 
hospital that large digital archives have agreed to use some ISO 
standard that's a subset of PDF, called something like PDF/A.

> What I think is important is that activities are given a chance to 
> produce themselves the printable document, as they are the ones that 
> can better do that.
+1. It just needs to go through Journal, like downloads from Browse do.

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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