[KLUG Members] Printing and Linux

[Komal]

Hello,

Before anyone brings up the topic, this has nothing to do with vendors
not releasing their specs.  This is purely a usability issue, it
should
work well even if you're just printing to a file, but it doesn't.

We're at a stage where handing a job over to the print spooler (cups
for
example) shows it up in the print queue.  This is no different from 15
years ago, except that we now have a nice gui to show us the print
queue.

What also sucks is that you need root (or sudo) privs to change the
printer configuration for a single print.  If a printer is configured
to
print double sided on A4 size paper in medium quality colour, no user
can change that.  My dad needed to print on legal paper, and I had to
ssh in and change the configuration.  My solution to this was to allow
all users to edit the cups configuration without needing a password.
This also is not great, because, my dad changing the settings from
OpenOffice should not affect my sister who wants to print from firefox
from her own login.

What does not happen:
- Spooler does not pop up an alert on error
- Printing to a remote printer gives you no feedback whatsoever
- Per session configuration by a user
- Common dialog for selecting printers from applications

The first should be easy enough to fix, and it would be cool if
someone
from this list could do that.  The second, is not hard (hey, windows
does it, so it can't be hard), and is a good choice for an engineering
project if 2 or 3 guys want to try it.  You need to look at the IPP
protocol.

The third requirement seems easy with CUPS as it provides job options
where you can override settings in the PPD file, however, using this
might tie an application to CUPS.

The fourth requirement could be very useful for applications built on
Gnome, for example.  We already have common dialogs for file handling,
colour handling and font handling.  Printer handling is missing.
Using
the CUPS API, it should be fairly easy to develop.  Hmm, maybe someone
should check if this already exists.  What I'm looking for is not a
gui
to manipulate printer options, but a dialog box that can be included
in
an application, which will provide options to select a printer,
orientation, and other properties, and actually pass the data along
with
these options to CUPS.

Any takers?

Regards,

Komal