[Libaps-general] Re: Collaboration proposal

[Brian P. <br...@co...>]

Hi Michael,

I've had a look at the project you've been working on, and it is very
interesting. I can certainly see how SysAPS would fit well into what
you're doing, as both projects need to solve some of the same problems.

You're right that the CUPS support currently in SysAPS is fairly
minimal; we began implementing a CUPS-specific transport, but it hasn't
come very far at all yet. We'd certainly welcome any collaboration you'd
like to do in this area.

We've also been experimenting with a Qt-based print dialog box to sit
ontop of CUPS. I like a lot of what is planned / in progress for the KDE
Print dialog box, and see the potential to combine the best ideas of
both into a single dialog box.

I've attached screen grabs of what we have so far. The basic idea is to
provide a tabbed dialog box that can easily be added to for application
or context specific pages. The "Page Settings" and "Options" pages
contain settings that a user / sysadmin could potentially set as
defaults for future jobs. The idea is that these same pages could also
appear in Control Center.

The "Page Settings" page contains a fixed set of job attributes that are
commonly available from a wide range of printers. The "Options" page
contains a list of all available job attributes. The idea here is to
have a dynamic UI that can display attributes from PPD files or other
sources without requiring the UI to be programmed to know about these
attributes ahead of time.

All of this code is now in the CVS repository at libaps.sourceforge.net.

I should also mention that I will be travelling for a month, and most
likely out of reach of email. In my absence, you should direction any
questions or discussions about the SysAPS project to the mailing list at
lib...@li.... There will be other people here at
Corel involved in the project monitoring the mailing list, and this
discussion should be able to continue in my absence.

Brian Pirie