[Sugar-devel] Print Support proposal (need input) Beta

[Wade Brainerd]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> I was not aware of any existing Activity which saves printable images or
> documents to the Journal in a format that is not commonly used outside of
> Sugar.  Since you protested I looked through the source code of Colors!,
> and sure enough, it seems to save Journal objects in its own special DRW
> format.

Yeah, pretty much every activity I have worked on has a custom format
requirement.  DRW for Colors!, JSON for Finance, JSON for Typing
Turtle, etc.  All of these activities could benefit from printing.

That said, for Colors! I already implemented image transfer using the
Copy feature.  You can Copy to the Clipboard and the save the
clipboard image to the Journal.  I'll also consider adding a Save
option to the Keep button, but I felt like Copy was ultimately more
discoverable at the time.

Either way though, how are we going to let users know what can be
printed and what can't?  We can't have them just arbitrarily clicking
on various Journal entries, guessing at obscure copy schemes, etc.

Personally I would be happiest with a Print button in the toolbar
whose handler is responsible for saving to one of the common formats
in a temp directory, and then passing that back to Sugar.

Best,
Wade