[Foomatic] Driver maintainers?

Grant Taylor gtaylor+foodev_djhbd101304 at picante.com
Wed Oct 13 08:36:01 PDT 2004


Stian Sletner <stian at sletner.com> writes:

> At an earlier visit, I considered adding something, but what I really
> wanted to change was the "works Perfectly" status. :)  Now that I'm
> starting to understand what a PPD file is, and where Ghostscript fits
> in, and such, the database does begin to make more sense.

The full database content was web-editable for several years.  The
result convinced me that the "edited" approach yields a higher overall
data quality.  Obviously it's bad if we get behind on the editing, but
IMHO increasingly stale data is not as bad as increasingly erronious
data.

But the core problem is that entirely too much emphasis is given to
the score.  People buy printers based on it, or give up for good;
neither of these actions should be taken on the strength of scores
alone.

> Sounds good, but great care should be taken when linking this together
> with the database and the rest of the site.  One thing is having all the
> information available, another is to present it such that it gives a
> natural path of learning (for those who are digging around the site),
> attempting to answer the questions as they invariably come up, perhaps
> keeping a short intro to each concept apart from the deeper
> documentation, etc.

So you suggest more a combination of pruning/reorganizing,
navigational improvements, a single highly visible toplevel overview
of how stuff works, and assorted detail closer to the support data
itself?

> Not aesthetics, really.  It has more to do with usability, how it's
> all stitched together.  In what format the communication happens,
> the perceived "distance" between various fora, the threshold for
> participation and the level of comfort with which such participation
> takes place.  

Hmm.  There are a potentially bewildering number of parallel things -
the wikish user comment space, the many forums, etc.

> All right.  I think I might have explained the problem clumsily.  What
> seems to happen isn't that something is left out, or scaled wrong, but
> rather that the whole thing is shifted upwards.  I took a picture of a
> CUPS test page to avoid all confusion:
> 
> http://home.powertech.no/sletner/testpage.jpg

Hmm.  Try changing the alignment with the alignment adjusting page.
Try step 6 from the cups quickstart:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/cups-doc.html

-- 
Grant Taylor
Embedded Linux Consultant
http://www.picante.com/



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