The big problem is the Print Preview cannot show the effect of some of the print settings that are done in the print server (CUPS) or the printer, such as n-up. This is confusing to the user, why do some settings appear in the preview when others don't? Which do and don't? It's just a bad experience. To get around this would require CUPS to provide an API to generate Print Previews, it's something that needs fixing further down the stack. But that would not be a cross-platform solution, and nor would Qt implementing all the features themselves.
But I'm not saying Qt won't do this, I could well add a 'Preview' button in the dialog and they might well accept it, but this will just launch QPrintPreview and probbaly ignore most of the settings from the Print Dialog. It could be better to expand QPrintPreview to support the options that are not CUPS dependent like page ranges.
Long term, the OpenPrinting dialog looks promising, as it provides an interactive preview built into the Print Dialog, but it requires a major re-architecting of how apps talk to the print dialog to acheive that.
As for reviving KDEPrint, well you obviously don't realise the enormity of the problem, if we had the manpower and expertise we would never have let it die in the first place...
The big problem is the
The big problem is the Print Preview cannot show the effect of some of the print settings that are done in the print server (CUPS) or the printer, such as n-up. This is confusing to the user, why do some settings appear in the preview when others don't? Which do and don't? It's just a bad experience. To get around this would require CUPS to provide an API to generate Print Previews, it's something that needs fixing further down the stack. But that would not be a cross-platform solution, and nor would Qt implementing all the features themselves.
But I'm not saying Qt won't do this, I could well add a 'Preview' button in the dialog and they might well accept it, but this will just launch QPrintPreview and probbaly ignore most of the settings from the Print Dialog. It could be better to expand QPrintPreview to support the options that are not CUPS dependent like page ranges.
Long term, the OpenPrinting dialog looks promising, as it provides an interactive preview built into the Print Dialog, but it requires a major re-architecting of how apps talk to the print dialog to acheive that.
As for reviving KDEPrint, well you obviously don't realise the enormity of the problem, if we had the manpower and expertise we would never have let it die in the first place...