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Thursday, 04 Jun 2009
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Thursday, 04 Jun 2009
Philipp Lohmann
As detailed before OpenOffice.org 3.2 should have a new print UI. Work on this is currently progressing nicely, the API changes are mostly in, even if not everything does work yet. The most movement at the moment is in the UI specification (aka "What is the dialog going to look like?"). Here are some current snapshots from the platform independent dialog:
First the page for general job settings:
And then a useful new feature called N-Up. You know that from other applications or from you printing system (if you happen to be a Unix or Mac user), however up to now there was no canonical way to do this in OpenOffice.org. Writer has its "Page Preview" to achieve a similar effect, Impress has a special handout mode to put multiple handout slides on one page, but we were lacking a simple, application independent way to achieve this nice paper saving effect.
Please keep in mind that this is just a snapshot of current work, the UI is not finalized. If you are interested in helping with UI issues, please discuss your ideas on the User Experience mailing list. One of the open issues is how to use the new print UI with the native Mac print dialog, in which some rather infelicitous limitations exist: first you can add options to change your print result in the dialog, but those option cannot influence the number of printed pages (which can be worked around by canceling the dialog and starting the print anew). And second if you want to run on MacOSX 10.4, too, and add print options, then you cannot get a preview (even if you ask nicely by setting explicitly the "I want a preview" flag). So at the moment we end up with the unusual result, that our new general dialog has a preview while the Mac native one does not. If anyone knows a solution to this problem (that is different from: have a separate 10.5 build, which we do not really want), please tell.
Even if there are still some issues to solve and the UI to be finalized: I think we're well on the way to have a new improved print interface for OpenOffice.org 3.2. Let me thank all the people making this possible: Mathias Bauer (Sfx), Andre Fischer (Impress), Thomas Lange (Writer), Christian Lippka (Impress), Niklas Nebel (Calc), Christoph Noack (User Experience). Thanks for your hard work; I know your schedules are tight even without this.
tags: openoffice.org
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Comments
Hi Philipp,
the Screenshots look very good! It's a very clean understandable UI!
Best Regards,
Jörg
Posted by Jörg on June 04, 2009 at 10:46 PM CEST #
Why does Openoffice always try to reinvent the wheel? There are already perfectly fine dialogs for this on every system that supports printing. OOo having a different dialog compared to all the other apps does not help the user at all!
Posted by Greg on June 05, 2009 at 07:49 AM CEST #
Greg:
1. had you looked at the windows dialogs, you wouldn't say there are perfectly fine dialogs on every system ;-)
2. Supporting at least 4 dialogs (Windows, Mac, KDE, Gnome) is considerably more effort than one general dialog
3. We DO support the native dialog on the Mac, and if I ever come around to it, on Gnome, too. However Using the Mac Dialog while maintaining MacOSX 10.4 compaitibility sadly strips it of some of its features.
Posted by 192.9.112.196 on June 05, 2009 at 11:39 AM CEST #
My view is that the current design is pretty elegant. By default OOo offers the same dialogs on all platforms, but allows you to enable the native dialog if desired. We have people that move from Mac, Linux and Windows and the more things that are consistent the better. If you develop some thumbnail code, please get it into the file manager as well. People would love to be able to see the first page of documents when they single click a file name!
Posted by Dave on June 05, 2009 at 02:54 PM CEST #
Last time I checked, KDE 4.2.4 has crippled Printing and relies on QtPrint.
That layout is clean.
GNOME's print panel isn't much to look at, let alone brag about.
Having a clean UI like above would be a welcome addition.
Posted by Marc J. Driftmeyer on June 09, 2009 at 07:41 AM CEST #
Shouldn't you focus on all the OOo quality issues (see http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/does_openoffice_org_3_x) instead of inventing a new Mac OS X print UI? The default Mac OS X print UI is sufficient IMHO …
Posted by MacMacken on July 03, 2009 at 12:12 AM CEST #
What can I say ? My bug fix ratio varies of course but I guess 4 bugs a week on average might hit it. That would be around 2000 fixed bugs in the last ten years. Incidentally I don't remember seeing any patch submissions from MacMacken, but surely that's my mistake, isn't it ?
Posted by Philipp Lohmann on July 03, 2009 at 11:41 AM CEST #
@Philipp Lohmann: Oh, the 'opera critics have to be opera singers' argument … how pathetic!
Posted by MacMacken on July 03, 2009 at 11:47 AM CEST #
Even an opera critic has to get credibility from somewhere. So what's your excuse for saying "well, I don't like how you spend your time, do something else".
Posted by Philipp Lohmann on July 03, 2009 at 11:57 AM CEST #
Will you use at least the printer functions provided by the printer driver through the operating system?
For example http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=70531 is a big show stopper if someone wants to print 10 copies of a document and have them sorted by the printer (big office printers often have such functionality) without using the printer driver dialog and tell the driver to make 10 copies.
Microsoft Word, for example, handles this much better.
I know open office is not the only software ignoring most of the printer functionality provided by the OS and driver. But still, this needs to be handled in a better way.
Posted by Peter on July 03, 2009 at 04:35 PM CEST #
The copy count was passed to the printer driver already unless you used the "Collate" checkbox, in which case the copies were done by the application. I don't know really why that was done so, in the revised printing system the copycount and collate functionality of the printer will be used. Collation will of course still have to be done manually by the application if the printer does not support it, but if the printer has collation, then there is no reason to not use it I think. This is one of the many annoyances I hope to solve with revamping printing.
Posted by Philipp Lohmann on July 03, 2009 at 05:36 PM CEST #