Speakers
Description
The OpenPrinting project “Common Print Dialog Backends” provides a D-Bus interface to separate the print dialog GUI from the communication with the actual printing system (CUPS, Google Cloud Print, e.t.c.) having each printing system being supported with a backend and these GUI-independent backends working with all print dialogs (GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE, LibreOffice, e.t.c.). This allows for easily updating all print dialogs when something in a print technology changes, as only the appropriate backend needs to get updated. Also new print technologies can get easily introduced by adding a new backend.
For quickly getting this concept into the Linux distributions we need these important tasks to be done.
The CUPS backend tells the print dialog only about printer-specific user-settable options, not about general options implemented in CUPS or cups-filters and so being available for all print queues. These are options like N-up, reverse order, selected pages, e.t.c. as they are only common for CUPS and not necessarily available with other print technologies like Google Cloud Print, they should get reported to the print dialog by the CUPS backend.
A print dialog should allow to print into a (PDF) file. This should be implemented in a new print dialog backend. [DONE: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cpdb-backend-file]
As it will take time until GTK4 with its new print dialog is out, we should get support for the new Common Print Dialog Backends concept for the current GTK3 dialog. As this dialog has its own backend concept one simply would need an “adapter” backend to get from the old concept to the new, common concept.
[Qt print dialog integration]
