Re: [Gramps-devel] A ScreenDoc idea

[Alex R. <sh...@gr...>]

Doug,

On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 10:21 -0500, Douglas S. Blank wrote:
> Here's a suggestion. Make gnomeprint and its preview part of the first
> screen when setting the options for the report. For example, when you
> select, say, Calendar, it immediately would display "January" (page 1)
> in a preview window. Each time you change an option (text, font, filter,
> etc) it would regenerate the report and display a nearly instantaneous
> preview. (Not all reports generate this quickly, but many do. If it is
> in another interruptable thread, then no big deal even if it takes a
> moment).
>=20
> I've made a fake mock-up at:
>=20
> http://bubo.brynmawr.edu/~dblank/images/print-options.png

This sounds like a very neat idea. We may or may not be able to do
this because gnomeprint is very sparsely documented and hard to
work with, but we should definitely try.

> The interactive reports were an interesting idea, but I wouldn't have
> even had it if the reports preview was better integrated with the option
> selection. Frankly, now I think time would be better spent in making
> print preview work more smoothly than introducing yet another back-end
> with yet another set of fonts, etc. to deal with.

I agree. The setup then should be: display current options
(remembered from last runs or defaults, as appropriate) and the
report preview with these very options. Then listen to events in
all UI widgets and regenerate preview on change events. On systems
where gnomeprint fails to import no preview will be available,
which is just fine.

I foresee more problems with the book: do we preview the whole
book or each individual item as it is being set up, or both?
But this is the next order correction :-)

If you feel like doing it, it would be great! The LPRDoc is
reasonably well commented (as much as we could gather from
gnomeprint docs) and the best gnomeprint docs are probably here:
   http://www.pygtk.org/pygnomeprint/


Otherwise, it will probably be some time before I'm free
enough to look at this. We're fighting the raging fires
in HEAD: atomic transactions, family view, etc.

Alex

--=20
Alexander Roitman   http://www.gramps-project.org