Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Dynamic UI

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

   Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 12:59:46 +0100
   From: Andy Thaller <th...@ph...>

   Working on the canon-driver I've realized there are combinations of
   resolution,paper and ink that just don't make sense. While this
   isn't really a great insight I nonetheless wanted to discuss it
   here. When it comes to a redesign of the GUI I suggest we make it
   somewhat dynamic so it takes the valid combinations into account
   and hides the unsupported ones. Perhaps we should think about a
   mechanism in the backend to allow for this kind of flexibility.

It already is slightly dynamic; whenever the choice of printer
changes, the available paper sizes, resolution, paper type, and paper
source options are updated.  This particular problem could be solved
fairly easily, I think, but in general the UI isn't very flexible.

There's a package called pdq out there that acts as a replacement to
the lp system (at http://feynman.tam.uiuc.edu/pdq/) that looks like a
big step in the right direction for Linux/Unix printing in general,
although currently its UI support is also static.  I suspect that in
the long run they're going to want to do more UI hacking than we will,
although if we come up with a good model they might be interested in
borrowing from it.

(As far as I can tell, we're basically at the forefront of free
printing systems for Linux in general right now in a lot of ways.
What's scary is that even in terms of UI we're not giving up much, as
clunky as it is right now.)

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rl...@al...>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lp...@uu...

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton