Lexington Proceedings
From Printing
Contents |
General
The aim of the three-days sessions at the Linux Printing Summit in Lexington was:
- to learn and understand the requirements of printer vendors and and get information about the general contexts, constrains and market logics of printers.
- to get input on technical settings, feasibilities
- to outline how unified printing dialogs must be developed
- to discuss in detail potential dialog realisations
- to sketch dialogs
- to shape some form of roadmap
The idea of proto dialogs
While the initial idea was to have one dialog for all applications, for all printers, at our initial talk we presented our conclusion that one single dialog cannot fit all needs.
A printer dialog for a home user, local connection, ink-jet color, must be different then one for a large-enterprise user, network connection, color-laser, with duplex and stapeling.
Instead, we propose multiple dialogs with a common core component, that is extended with application features and driver features.
The deliverable are prototypical dialogs that cover clusters of usage/user/printer/environment combinations. In addition, we give implementation hints that try to describe as accurately how the final dialog should look like, in accordance with the HIG of the different platforms/toolkits.
Dialogs and market segments
If one dialog does not fit all, based on what factors do we want to generate the specialized dialogs?
The idea is that not every printer is used for every purpose, for every environment, for every application, for every document type, from every user. Instead, there are clusters, combinations of factors that are more often together than others.
We are convinced that a lot of knowledge about these usage segments exists at the vendors, and how they cover the market. We understand that their market perspective may have short comings, but it is a good start. Printers are not constructed for everyone, but for specific users. Even $50 multipurpose inkjet printers are specific in that they are rather not used in large enterprises, for large amounts of documents, for professional photoprinting, for duplex printing, etc.
Analytical segmentation of usage scenarios
Printing vs. transformation, preview
Printing basicall consists of bringing "something" on the paper (or other medium). "Something" can mean:
- Page oriented document (like word processor) that is presented on screen as it is intented to appear on paper;
- Screen oriented document: main usage type is to work on it or use it on screen, but printing may be a final goal, or to change the usage environment (offline reading). Examples are:
- Spread-sheet document where the screen appearence is likely to be different to the paper output (although there are efforts from some applications to get a stronger correspondance);
- and similarily browsers, where printing is for documentation purposes (archive), for offline reading, or for offline usage (boarding pass). The transformation in the browser may be different for page types, like one large page, or pdf orientied pages (fitting to paper).
- Photo or similar document that has rather no intrinsic size and where printing means to place the screen object adequately on paper.
To grasp the meaning and the nature of the transformation process is essential, because it very much influences how the printing dialog must look like.
The preview is a feature to assure the user that the printer output meets the expectations. Corresponding to the three different "somethings", we have different functions that a preview must provide:
- Word processor (e.g): visibility of page breaks, image position, blank pages for page sequence oriented applications;
- Spreadsheet (e.g.): fitting on paper, number of pages, page breaks for spread sheet oriented applications, footer and headers;
- Browsers: fitting on paper, (background) color, (background) image display, column display, frames, font size;
- Image editing: Position or layout on paper, color, size for a (single) image oriented application.
The transformation leads to the question: was is a document (file) property, what is an output property? E.g. is the page margin of a word-processor document a property of the document or of the print output? Is the image size a property of the image or the print output? In order to get valid and usable distinctions, we need more information of how users think.
We have to decide, which transformation aspects belong to the print dialog, and which require conceptually either an own dialog, or must be handled otherwise. To put everything into the print dialog may not only confuse printing and transformation, but also may lead to non-usable dialogs.
Core components of the dialogs
The quest to identify core components for the unified printing dialog consists of three strategies
- Use Case driven list of features required on first level to print
- Empirically driven intersection across printing dialogs on all platforms, all application, all printers.
- Analysis of application and printr driven options according to print document types.
UI composition layers/process
The final UI that is exposed will consist of several layers. The most basic and fundamental layer is the driver.
