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

[Jameson Quinn]

OK, we just had an animated conversation on IRC in which almost nothing was
generally agreed-on.

Here's my refined proposal based on that conversation.

"Print preview" option in journal
Uses cups filters to convert to PDF
Set of cups filters available is distribution dependent. An officially
"print enabled" distribution would have a certain limited set of filters
installed (the obvious ones). Filters outside this set would be mildly
discouraged to avoid inconsistent behaviour.
filters would NOT be part of sugar-platform, to leave maximum flexibility
for deployments
if you had anything but the exact, limited set of "print-enabled" filters,
printing behaviour would be officially undesigned and unsupported
but nevertheless probably sane
enforcement would be social, not digital
the PDF thus created would have special "print-me" tag
To add to print queue, or any other queue management, you'd use Browse
there are several options for streamlining the workflow.
the moodle form could have metadata in the tag for the upload control to
tell sugar to please filter for "print-me" tag
this means making sugar understand this kind of metadata - independently
useful
you could make a "print" activity, a spin of browse, which handles PDFs
it would open the PDF using a pdf-viewer plugin
it would have an "enqueue" menu item
choosing this menu item would go to moodle and put the pdf in the upload tag
(using some greasemonkey-like trick)
You could modify sugar to know when to use "Print" instead of "Read" by
default, based on "print-me" tag
using something in activity.info
this functionality would be independently useful

Activities which wanted printing but did not naturally produce a format
within our basic filter list, could have a "print preview" menu item and use
gtkprint to export to pdfs with a "print-me" tag
gtkprint would be a dependency of sugar
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