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Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:52:06 +0200
From: Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmail.com>
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Subject: [Printing-architecture] Common Printing Dialog: Print to (PDF) file
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To: Open Printing <printing-architecture@lists.linux-foundation.org>, Lars Uebernickel <larsuebernickel@gmx.de>, Per Hermansson <hermansson.per@bredband.net>, Alexander Wauck <alex.wauck@gmail.com>

Hi,

the final design planning is that all applications should have "Export 
to PDF ..." in their file menus (like OpenOffice.org) with a dedicated 
dialog, similar to the CPD but yet to be designed by OpenUsability.

As this will take time and the current Qt and GTK printing dialogs 
contain a "Print to File" facility which appears as an extra print 
queue, we should implement such a "Print to File" queue also in the 
Common Printing dialog, so that we get it quickly into the distros 
without having a regression due to this feature missing.

For the implementation note that the current dialogs do not send the job 
into a CUPS queue for "Print to File" (we do not use facilities like the 
cups-pdf package). "Print to File" opens a "Save as ..." dialog when 
clicking on "Print" in the printing dialog. Then the user chooses where 
to put his file. This process is completely done by the printing dialog 
running as the calling user, nothing done by CUPS for it. At least GTK 
allows to choose between PostScript and PDF for such a file. For your 
implementation PDF would be the most important, PostScript can perhaps 
be dropped if it makes it too complicated.

It would be great if you could implement that in the Common Printing 
Dialog, ideally with a possibility for the application to suppress this 
feature (Lars, perhaps this needs an additional boolean parameter in the 
CPDAPI).

With this we will really be feature-complete.

As soon as the print-to-file dialog design is completed and it makes it 
into most applications, we can drop this feature from the printing 
dialog again.

    Till