[Printing-architecture] Coding the Common Printing Dialog and its interface

[Till Kamppeter]

Lars Uebernickel wrote:
> Till Kamppeter wrote:
>>> In this case, storing the configs along with the dialog would be enough,
>>> as it would be cross-referenced against printer queue and application
>>> being used.
>>>
>>> You are right, perhaps the application would want to store it matching
>>> against the document being printed. But that could be handled by the
>>> dialog too, it would just be another field or even a matter of defining
>>> a format for that domain name I talked about, "app[/doc hash]"..
>> OpenOffice.org saves printing settings (selected print queue and option 
>> settings) in its documents. To not require OOo to change the feature 
>> with the introduction of the Common Printing Dialog we should support 
>> this in our interface between application and dialog.
> 
> I see two possibilities for this problem:
> 
> (1) Applications can enable/disable the saving of the printing options 
> via the dialog API. This would mean that OpenOffice can keep its own per 
> document settings and other applications can take advantage of the 
> dialogs capabilities for that. But, they need to explicitly tell the 
> dialog to do so.
> 
> (2) Options are always saved on a per application/document basis by the 
> dialog. The saved options are applied _before_ any application settings 
> take place. The application will not be notified. Afterwards, the 
> application sets its own settings, effectively overwriting the saved 
> ones. So OpenOffice's per document options would still work, and all 
> other applications would gain the same feature transparently. It would 
> also keep the API cleaner.

Support both possibilities in a switchable way. Let application 
developers choose between option saving/remembering per

- Document file (saved in document file)
- Document (saved in personal config directory of the dialog)
- Application (saved in personal config directory of the dialog)
- Globally per user (saved in ~/.cups/lpoptions)

Only in the first case option settings which are not 
application-specific have to be reported back to the application.

    Till