Hello, It seems that KDE4 print dialog does not have the "Range" option that was in KDE 3.5. Under Option, Copies tab, it only has radio button for "Print all" or "Pages from: .. to ..". This is a regression of functionality, since in KDE 3.5, I can for example set and print the pages: 1-3,5,8-11; but not in KDE4. Is this correct or am I missing something ?
Is there bug report associated with this missing functionality ? I tried to search but didn't find anything.
Thanks. RDB
Reuben Budiardja wrote:
It seems that KDE4 print dialog does not have the "Range" option that was in KDE 3.5. Under Option, Copies tab, it only has radio button for "Print all" or "Pages from: .. to ..". This is a regression of functionality, since in KDE 3.5, I can for example set and print the pages: 1-3,5,8-11; but not in KDE4. Is this correct or am I missing something ?
The print dialog is now the one from Qt, because the old kdeprint stuff was really horribly broken at the KDE 4.0 release time (nobody had done the necessary work to port it all to KDE 4) and Qt's printing functionality has improved a lot over Qt 3, so a decision was made to go with Qt's functionality. Since 4.0, work has been done on improving Qt's printing functionality as much as possible and on replacing other parts of the old kdeprint (see the work on system-config-printer-kde and the associated printer-applet). Unfortunately, Qt 4's print dialog still doesn't support everything KDE 3's print dialog did.
Kevin Kofler
On Wednesday 01 July 2009 18:15:05 Kevin Kofler wrote:
Reuben Budiardja wrote:
since in KDE 3.5, I can for example set and print the pages: 1-3,5,8-11; but not in KDE4. Is this correct or am I missing something ?
... so a decision was made to go with Qt's functionality. <...> Unfortunately, Qt 4's print dialog still doesn't
support
everything KDE 3's print dialog did.
Thanks for your explanation. I guess I'll just have to wait for this functionality.
RDB
Kevin Kofler wrote:
Reuben Budiardja wrote:
/ It seems that KDE4 print dialog does not have the "Range" option that was
/>/ in KDE 3.5. Under Option, Copies tab, it only has radio button for "Print />/ all" or "Pages from: .. to ..". This is a regression of functionality, />/ since in KDE 3.5, I can for example set and print the pages: 1-3,5,8-11; />/ but not in KDE4. Is this correct or am I missing something ? / The print dialog is now the one from Qt, because the old kdeprint stuff was really horribly broken at the KDE 4.0 release time (nobody had done the necessary work to port it all to KDE 4) and Qt's printing functionality has improved a lot over Qt 3, so a decision was made to go with Qt's functionality. Since 4.0, work has been done on improving Qt's printing functionality as much as possible and on replacing other parts of the old kdeprint (see the work on system-config-printer-kde and the associated printer-applet). Unfortunately, Qt 4's print dialog still doesn't support everything KDE 3's print dialog did.
These features are being worked on and some of them already work fine: http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/i_feel_a_chill_breeze_on_the_back_of_...
Unfortunately John Layt missed the Qt 4.6 feature freeze: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171925#c16
So the problem is that these features won't get merged until Qt 4.7, which is quite far away from release...
Shipping these patches in Fedora Qt packages would break the "ABI or API Deviations" of the "staying close to upstream projects" policy rule, right? https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream
Regards, Diego
Diego wrote:
Unfortunately John Layt missed the Qt 4.6 feature freeze: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171925#c16
So the problem is that these features won't get merged until Qt 4.7, which is quite far away from release...
That really sucks. :-/ It's really crappy to turn down fine work done by contributors for ~9 more months just because it missed the feature freeze (which might not even have been publicly announced anywhere) by a mere week. I think Nokia really needs to show more flexibility there after their boasting about openness and community involvement. (That said, KDE has its problems there as well. Strict freezes suck! There needs to be more flexibility for small, 100% completed features.)
Shipping these patches in Fedora Qt packages would break the "ABI or API Deviations" of the "staying close to upstream projects" policy rule, right? https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream
Backporting API additions (assuming they're accepted for 4.7) is fine: it only adds things, it doesn't change or remove anything, so our Qt would still be binary compatible with binaries built against the official one (we don't really care about the other way round), and the API will be in 4.7, so it wouldn't be Fedora-specific. (That said, there IS a risk that the API and/or the ABI will change upstream until the final 4.7 release, we'd have to talk to both John Layt and Qt Software to ascertain the API is the final one.) I'd be fine with that. I'm more worried about the added translatable strings, as they'll stay untranslated. :-( But we might just decide we don't care (like we did for the panel autohide backport to KDE 4.1 and the strings that introduced).
That said, I'd prefer this getting merged into the kde-qt git branch (the new qt-copy), that way we'd pick it up automatically (and several other KDE distros would, too). But the KDE folks might complain about the translation issue as well.
Kevin Kofler
Diego wrote:
/ Unfortunately John Layt missed the Qt 4.6 feature freeze:
/>/ https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171925#c16 />/ />/ So the problem is that these features won't get merged until Qt 4.7, />/ which is quite far away from release... / That really sucks. :-/ It's really crappy to turn down fine work done by contributors for ~9 more months just because it missed the feature freeze (which might not even have been publicly announced anywhere) by a mere week.
John merged a hack for KDE 4.4, so we won't have to wait for Qt 4.7... http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly There are some shortcomings but at least the main feature is in place!
Regards, Diego
Diego wrote:
John merged a hack for KDE 4.4, so we won't have to wait for Qt 4.7... http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly There are some shortcomings but at least the main feature is in place!
Yuck! To be honest, I'd have preferred to backport the Qt patch than to ship that. :-/ But API/ABI compatibility is a concern and nobody is prepared to commit to setting the API in stone before the 4.7 timeframe. :-( (The Qt folks would have to do that and they don't give a darn about users' needs, they only care about their policies.) We could backport it anyway, we've backported other unstable APIs in the past (Plasma tooltips in 4.1, for example), but this will hit the whole QPrinter class, so we may end up with stuff using QPrinter not being backwards-compatible when 4.7 hits. Suckage all around, just because of stupid bureaucracy around a freeze and 1 week. :-/ Yet another example of why we need more flexible freezes!
What sucks about the hack: * doesn't work when printing to a file (the most serious issue) * supposedly doesn't work with n-up (but isn't odd/even sheets as opposed to pages actually what we want there? Odd/Even is normally used for manual duplex) * mixing ranges and odd/even is also going to be fun: if you print pages 2-5, is "odd" 3 and 5 or is it 2 and 4? (That said, this definition is always unclear. But with the hack, the answer might be different depending on whether the app selects the page range or CUPS does!) * apps have to waste time generating pages which will be thrown away by CUPS anyway
That said, I guess we'll pick the hack up anyway when we start shipping KDE 4.4, it's probably not worth deviating from upstream to pick up a better solution, but with an API subject to change. We won't see app support for e.g. printing only odd pages before KDE 4.6 anyway. :-( (Qt is on approximate 9-month cycles, so Qt 4.7 will likely hit in the middle of the KDE 4.5 bugfix cycle, too late to use Qt 4.7 features in KDE 4.5.)
Kevin Kofler
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Diego -
Kevin Kofler -
Reuben D. Budiardja