kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...>]

After much frustration with trying to print a schematic in Linux I
decided to roll up my sleeves and try to figure out what was going on.
It took me a while but I think I have come up with a solution that gives
some small measure of printing sanity on Linux without breaking printing
on Windows (the changes would need to validated on OSX). On GTK I
had to expose the page setup dialog to allow setting the feed
orientation (not page orientation) to 90 degrees to get the correct
orientation on both postscript and printer outputs. I am proposing that
we drop the current Eeschema print dialog and use a more conventional
printing approach by using typical print, print preview, and page setup
dialogs. Below is a synopsis of my proposal.

Problems with existing dialog:
1) Non standard printing design.
2) Fails to expose wxPageSetupDialog which fixes some (not all) GTK
printing issues.
3) Pen width setting is meaningless at best and confusing at worst due
to internal scaling used to fit the schematic to the pinter page size.
4) Only allows current page or all pages to be printed.
5) Doesn't respect printer configuration dialog color selection.

Proposed changes:
1) Remove current print dialog.
2) Add print preview and page setup entries to file menu.
3) Display platform print dialog when selecting print menu and print
tool bar button.
4) Add project setting to hide or show the sheet reference and title
block to the configuration settings dialog.
5) Display and print sheet reference and title block according to the
configuration setting.
6) Custom print preview that saves and restores it's position and size
between sessions.

Advantages:
1) You can actually get something that resembles a sane output on GTK.
2) Printing will be similar to most applications that users are familiar
with.
3) Removes an intermediate dialog and uses platform print dialog directly.
4) Uses print dialog page selection to allow full or partial page printing.
5) One less dialog to maintain.
6) Uses platform printer dialog to select grey scale or color printing.
7) Print preview saves and restores position and size between sessions.
8) User can create custom sheet reference and title block.

Disadvantages:
1) Requires two step setup to print properly on GTK which will be confusing.
2) Lose monochrome printing (black and white) if not available as option
in printer configuration dialog.
3) No direct way to disable printing of the reference frame and title block.

If there is a consensus that this is preferable to the current printing
solution, I will commit the changes.

Wayne