9.1 Proposal: Printing support

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 6:41 PM, Robert Myers <rmyers7 at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> Peter Krenesky (CC'd) from the Open Source Lab at Oregon State has
>> discussed some printing basics with me, and may have already begun
>> further research in this area.  There is some info in the wiki on the
>> subject: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_CUPS,
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Printing_Design, but I'm not sure how far
>> along any hacking has actually gotten.
>>
>
> I've had CUPS running on my XO since very early on. I just 'yum install
> cups'. I can print to a printer attached to and shared by a Mac which is
> on the same net as my XO with no issues. I can print from apps under
> Sugar which still have print hooks like Firefox, and from apps in XFCE.
>
> This biggest issue seems to me to get printing support into Sugar and
> Sugar activities, and a reasonable UI to select printers.
>
> I think printing should be possible on the XO. I realize that the
> average child/customer is not likely to have a printer, but it also
> seems reasonable to have printers available as a school resource
> particularly if there's an XS. Letting a child have permanent printouts
> of completed projects seems to be a really positive proof of
> accomplishment to me. Printing also seems to me as a must have for G1G1.
> These folks expect their computers to be able to print.

And teachers!

I don't expect printing support to be specially hard to add to
activities, compared to any other app.

Gtk+ has improved it's printing support in the last releases and when
combined to the offline rendering of widgets in the last release,
would make quite easy to add printing to activities like TurtleArt
when just printing what is displayed in the activity window would make
sense.

Browse, Write and Read should be able to leverage the printing code
already in their basic components (resp. mozilla, abiword and evince)
and expose it through the Sugar UI.

Regards,

Tomeu