Sometime Today, K cobbled together some glyphs to say:

Printing subsystem always baffles me. Printing in windows is very intuitive and easy. If I fire print job and if print cord is not connected to printer or printer is offline print spooler flashes

yeah, it's one of the things that are still immature in unix, but CUPS is trying to change that.

Before anyone brings up the topic, this has nothing to do with vendors not releasing their specs. This is purely a usability issue, it should work well even if you're just printing to a file, but it doesn't.

We're at a stage where handing a job over to the print spooler (cups for example) shows it up in the print queue. This is no different from 15 years ago, except that we now have a nice gui to show us the print queue.

What also sucks is that you need root (or sudo) privs to change the printer configuration for a single print. If a printer is configured to print double sided on A4 size paper in medium quality colour, no user can change that. My dad needed to print on legal paper, and I had to ssh in and change the configuration. My solution to this was to allow all users to edit the cups configuration without needing a password. This also is not great, because, my dad changing the settings from OpenOffice should not affect my sister who wants to print from firefox from her own login.

What does not happen: - Spooler does not pop up an alert on error - Printing to a remote printer gives you no feedback whatsoever - Per session configuration by a user - Common dialog for selecting printers from applications

The first should be easy enough to fix, and it would be cool if someone from this list could do that. The second, is not hard (hey, windows does it, so it can't be hard), and is a good choice for an engineering project if 2 or 3 guys want to try it. You need to look at the IPP protocol.

The third requirement seems easy with CUPS as it provides job options where you can override settings in the PPD file, however, using this might tie an application to CUPS.

The fourth requirement could be very useful for applications built on Gnome, for example. We already have common dialogs for file handling, colour handling and font handling. Printer handling is missing. Using the CUPS API, it should be fairly easy to develop. Hmm, maybe someone should check if this already exists. What I'm looking for is not a gui to manipulate printer options, but a dialog box that can be included in an application, which will provide options to select a printer, orientation, and other properties, and actually pass the data along with these options to CUPS.

Any takers?

Philip