john.layt.net

All going well, my code for adding Current Page and Page Set selection (aka Odd/Even pages) to Qt should now be up on gitorious for all to see and try out.  For those of you not wanting the hassle of compiling, here's a screenie:

The Gitorious branch is at http://qt.gitorious.org/~odysseus/qt/odysseus-clone/commits/current-odd-even.  I still have a few bits of polish to add, like disabling Page Set if Current Page is selected, and the initialisation is something I'm not 100% happy with, but it's mostly there and working.  I've been testing the last couple of days witout a real printer, but it should still be OK. I also haven't tested it compiles under Windows or OSX, so I'd be grateful to someone did :-)

So what does it do?

• If you're on X11 / LPR and running an app that hasn't been modified, then you see nothing new.
• If you're on X11 / CUPS and running an app that hasn't been modified, then you see the Page Set combo and CUPS takes care of the odd/even page selection.
• If you're on X11 with CUPS or LPR and running an app that has been modified, then you see the Current Page (if set by the app) and the Page Set and the app takes care of the odd/even page selection.
• If you are on OSX or Windows then you see nothing new (as yet).  Good news on that front is I have just seen a commit that moves Qt to using the Win2k print dialog instead of the Win98 print dialog, which should make adding these new features way easier. I still need help here though!

So how to modify an app?  Easy.  To enable the Current Page, just call QPrinter::setCurrentPage() with whatever your current page number is before you exec the print dialog.  To enable Page Set fully, just call QPrinter::setPageSelectionMode(QPrinter::AdvancedPageSelection) before you exec the print dialog, then make sure you either use the new QPrinter::pageList() method to get a list of the pages to render (the easy way) or use QPrinter::pageSet() to figure it out yourself (the hard way).

For reference, the newly added QPrinter public api is:

			enum PrintRange { AllPages, Selection, PageRange, CurrentPage }; // Just added CurrentPage
	enum PageSelectionMode { SimplePageSelection, AdvancedPageSelection };
	enum PageSet { PageSetAllPages, PageSetOddPages, PageSetEvenPages };
	void setPageSet(PageSet);
	PageSet pageSet() const;
	void setCurrentPage(int);
	int currentPage() const;
	void setPageSelectionMode(PageSelectionMode);
	PageSelectionMode pageSelectionMode() const;
	QList<int> pageList() const;
	

 

So, have a look, have a play, and let me know when you find my bugs :-)

[EDIT: Just a reminder this is a change to Qt so depends on the Trolls accepting it, but I'm hoping it makes it into Qt4.6 which will be out before KDE 4.4 so that's the up side]