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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 19:20, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:
> 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.

That's fine, if the user wishes to control that, then does the
conversion to PDF locally and sends the PDF.

Regards,

Tomeu

> 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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