My point of view is that, ideally, printing should be from the journal (or even from a separate "print" activity), for both security and UI reasons. The UI reason is that conceptually separating "edit document" and "preview / print document" is a workflow that will likely save resources.<br>
<br>So the workflow I'd propose is the following. In <span style="background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);">grey</span> are items that I'd consider optional for this GSoC, in <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">yellow</span> are ones that I'd consider clearly outside the scope of this GSoC.<br>
<br>"Print preview" option in journal<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Uses cups filters to convert to PDF<br>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.<br>
<span style="background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);">the PDF thus created would have special "print-me" metadata</span><br style="background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);"><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);">in other words, sugar would use metadata to choose which of several activities which handle a mime-type to use as default</span><br>
</div></div>"send to print queue" option for pdfs<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">default action from journal for "print-me" pdfs<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">provided by an activity which handles only pdf mime type<br>
<div style="margin-left: 40px;">in GSoC time-frame, this could be an activity with NO UI, just send to queue and terminate<br><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">later, this activity could first show a preview and allow send-to-queue as an option</span><br>
<span style="background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);">there could be an alternate version of this activity which actually printed directly, over USB or wirelessly</span><br></div></div>Obviously, these pdfs could also be viewed using "open with"-"Read".<br>
</div>All queue management besides enqueue would be done through browse/moodle<br><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 "print-me" pdfs.</span><br>
<div style="margin-left: 40px;">gtkprint would be a dependency of sugar<br></div><br><br>