Printerpullpages
Introduction
A new printing UI should give us better performance, more ease of use and overall more customer satisfaction. New features like the instant preview in a print dialog as well as unified N-Up printing for all applications will bring OOo's print experience more up to current standards. Additionally system integration can benefit by making use of native print dialogs (for which the MacOSX implementation will be the prime example). The development is done in the CWS printerpullpages.
Comments, questions or feedback is welcomed on the ui@ux.openoffice.org mailing list.
Please note that the wiki page is under heavy development. We hope to provide more information (requirements and constraints, specifications, mockups, ...) in the next few days. Thanks for you patience!
The team working on the feature:
| Role | Name | E-Mail Address |
| I-Team Lead | Philipp Lohmann (PL) | Philipp.Lohmann@Sun.COM |
| Developer |
Philipp Lohmann (PL) |
Philipp.Lohmann@Sun.COM |
| Quality Assurance | Hasan Ilter (HI) | Hasan.Ilter@Sun.COM |
| Documentation | tbd | tbd |
| User Experience |
Christoph Noack |
christophnoack@openoffice.org |
Requirements
Scope of the Work
tbd
List of Requirements
The following list contains the most important requirements. Okay, these aren't real requirements, it is more like a what-feature-is-generally-desired list.
- The new print functionality shall provide an native print dialog. As an alternative, a system independent print dialog is used.
- The new print dialog shall provide all application specific print options which are necessary for most printing tasks.
- The new print dialog shall provide a print preview. The visualization is updated immediately if print options are changed (immediately: time until final visualization <= 500 ms).
Technical Constraints
The following list contains the most important technical constraints which will have impact on the final interaction and dialog design.
- Options: Especially the application specific options have to be "compatible" to be used in the native print dialogs. This refers to the overall number (space restrictions in the native print dialogs), the organization (it should be possible to define property groups), controls (limited use of graphical UI controls), layout (layouting is limited to what the operating system provides), ...
- Size: Since printing is an ordinary task, the dialog should be usable on computers with low screen resolution (e.g. Netbooks with 576px height) and large screens (e.g. PCs)
- GUI elements:
- Non-standard controls: Since printing will provide some visual output, it is strongly desirable to use graphical controls (e.g. for the print order). Especially for embedding of application specific print options into native print dialogs this might cause problems, since a) it might be impossible, or b) it might create additional effort for porting.
- Element "Group Box": Since OpenOffice.org 2.2 group boxes have been replaced by simple horizontal or vertical lines to divide dialogs. As a result, these group boxes aren't themed at the moment (themed: adapted to the visual style of the graphical user interface of certain operating systems).
- Layout: Currently, there is no GUI layout manager available which resizes all dialog elements according the size of the screen and the size of each of the dialog's objects. Consequence: Static dialog layout which considers the space requirements for other languages.
- Mac OS X Compatibility: OpenOffice.org is made to run on a variety of Mac OS X versions. Some of those provide a different feature set with regard to printing, so that there is a need for a compromise to satisfy most of the users.
- 10.4 (Tiger): Application specific options can be integrated in the native print dialog, but there is no page preview available.
- 10.5 (Leopard): Application specific can be integrated in the native print dialog, and a print preview can be made available.
Current State of Printing in OpenOffice.org 3.0
Features and Options Revisited
Currently, there are many options in OpenOffice.org with regard to printing. When looking at the technical constraints (e.g. native dialogs vs. system independent dialog, application settings vs. operating system settings), the space restrictions, ... it seems to make sense to have a look at the current options. Is each option really necessary, can it be well understood? Most of the data is currently provided in several Calc documents which get (hopefully) updated regularly.
- File:Current Dialogs ListOfAllPrintDialogElements.ods: List of all printing dialog elements and options with regard to their meaning, understandability and necessity. It also includes developer comments, which I have to thank for. Worth reading and commenting ;-)
- File:Current UserFeedbackData Impress PrintingAnalysis.ods: Based on the very first first User Feedback Data there is a short analysis considering Impress. Please note that the User Feedback system still has the drawback that some of the sources of function requests can not be identified. Since OpenOffice.org works very efficiently, some of the function calls are handled independent from the module (e.g. the number for Printing Dialog function calls is for all modules, not only Impress). The rest of the application specific data (e.g. "Print: Page name") is specific for e.g. Impress and Draw. I hope that I'm able to provide similar documents for the other modules (Writer, Calc) in the near future.
Screenshots
This section is intended to show some of the places where OpenOffice.org provides functionality or options concerning printing. You may see that it is not just related to the printing dialog, so that we have to keep an eye on consistency. And if you look very closely, the current user interface isn't that consistent and (maybe) understandable, so please refer to #Features_and_Options_Revisited
Print Dialogs
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Print Options Dialogs
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Various Printer Dialogs
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PDF Export Dialog
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Competitive Analysis
General
Please note that although we do competitive analysis, we won't publish too many information here, e.g. screenshots. If you are interested in a special program, then try to search for images in your favorite internet search. In 99% of all cases, you will get some pictures and a first idea how it looks like ... and most presumably how it will behave.
Another good approach is to have a look at the official documentation of our platforms:
- Apple User Interface Guidelines, The Print Dialog
- Microsoft Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines, Common Dialogs (scroll down a bit, since the print dialog is not listed in the TOC)
Acrobat Reader
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Notice that you can set the arrangement of the pages on the paper sheet in drop down list 'Page Order'. That might be interesting for OOo, because OOo is used in different language and some users writing in e.g. Hebrew or Asian languages might have other preferred arrangements. Notice also the glider under the preview. There you can "scroll" through all sheets to see whether they are printed as desired. The 'page scaling' drop down list contains also the option 'brochure'. The fields beneath change according to the 'page scaling' choice. The sheet orientation is taken from the printer properties. That is more comfortable in OOo, where you set landscape or portrait in the printing dialog. Provided by Regina ... thanks! |
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Native Printer Driver Dialog on WinXP from HP Color Jet 2605
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| The pictures show details of a native printer properties dialog of an HP Color Laser Jet 2605 on WinXp. The printer itself can do a lot of things, which can be set in OOo printer dialog. But this is a modern printer with an actual driver. I doubt that older printers or drivers for Linux allow all of this settings.
Even in this modern driver an option for customize N-Up arrangement is missing, the feature for n identical pages on one sheet is not available and the N-Up does not allow margins and spacing. Provided by Regina ... thanks! | ||||
Definition of Terms
Definitions for the use on this wiki page and the specification. They might be different to the final user interface terminology.
| System Independent Print Dialog | A print dialog that is independent from the underlying operating system, since it is provided by OpenOffice.org. This dialog is used if either the native print dialog is not available or the user explicitly wants to use it instead of the native one. Besides the application specific options, it is required for the print dialog to handle also: printer selection, printer status text, print to file, copy count, collate, N-up printing |
| Native Print Dialog | The native print dialog is the one provided by the operating system, e.g. Mac OS X. The advantage is the visual and behavioral consistency among all applications on the platform, but there are also technical constraints which limit the flexibility of the design. |
| Application Specific Print Options | OpenOffice.org consists of several modules optimized for certain document types, e.g. word processing (Writer) or spreadsheet editing (Calc). For each of the document types the user may require special options which do only make sense with regard to a certain document type (e.g. printing of Notes). Most of these options are today (OpenOffice.org <= 3.1) available in the print options dialog and the tools options settings pages. |
| N-up printing | N-up printing refers to multiple page printing, so that more than one document page (created in the application) is printed on the real paper page. Usually the user selects the number of pages to be printed, e.g. 2 on 1. |
| Print Preview | A preview of what the document will look like when printed out. Therefore this preview should take as much as available print options into account. The print preview is given in the print dialog and therefore complements the page preview available in the file menu in some applications. |
Design Proposals
tbd
Status and Roadmap
It is planned to provide a new basic dialog in OpenOffice.org 3.2. So the interaction design should be finished until end of June 2009. Hopefully ;-)
Current State
- The development happens since quite a few months. Recently, User Experience jumped in and will try to further improve the dialog and the overall workflow concerning printing.
- Development versions: Development versions can be found at ftp://qa-upload.services.openoffice.org/printerpullpages/
- Issue Tracker: All issues with an descriptive entry “printerpullpages” can be listed with Extended Issue Tracker Query
- EIS: The EIS entry for “printerpullpages” is located at http://tools.services.openoffice.org/EIS2/cws.ShowCWS?logon=true&Id=7202&Path=DEV300%2Fprinterpullpages
Future Tasks
If there are interesting ideas how to further improve printing in OpenOffice.org, then the development might continue for future version of OpenOffice.org.
Philipp said that Caolan, a guy working for RedHat, offered some help to bind the native print dialog in Gnome (GTK). Some years ago, he already blogged about the gnomeprintui.
Other Ideas
| Date Raised | Source | Summary | Status | Details |
| ??? | I-Team Specification | Replace Print Preview Printing | Accepted | Currently, Writer provides very flexible N-up capabilities. This should be made available to all applications – via the new print dialog. |
| ??? | I-Team | Improve Workflows | New | Besides the printing dialog, the concepts and the handling of printing options is difficult in OpenOffice.org (currently we just provide a list of options which have to be combined in a useful manner – here the user has to know exactly what to do).
Another example is the work-flow breaking dialog handling when printing. More information can be found in the blog post Transparent Decision Making. So this is no real “idea”, it is more a reminder to keep an eye on that. |
| 2009-06-11 | I-Team | Contextual Information Bar | New | As discussed in “Improve Workflows”, there are currently a number of modal dialogs which might interrupt the workflow. So how about a contextual information bar which informs only (e.g. for wrong page sizes, transparency, gradients, ...)? How about adding a contextual information bar in the dialog itself...
 On the other hand, it would be better to get rid of all these additional informations, warnings and decisions. Open Questions:
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| ??? | I-Team | Harmonize printing and PDF export | New | Currently, the capabilities of printing and PDF export differ a lot (Example: There is no way to export handouts in Impress.) Why not harmonize that? |
| 2009-06-14 | I-Team | Printer Presets | New | Currently, we provide a lot of printer settings which have to be combined by the user. Generally, users use only a small number of combinations, since they are editing similar documents. So they might just use settings for "draft" or "final output". Print settings which could be customized could help here (costomized: edited, saved, loaded, deleted). Some competitors already offer this kind of functionality. |
Mockups and Screenshots
This section contains mockups and screenshots:
- Mockups are working models used for demonstration purposes. There is no real functionality at all, because the following pictures have been composed with graphic programs just to get a first impression how it will look like.
- Screenshots show the behavior of the real development in OpenOffice.org. Those pictures are updated more or less regularly.
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Current state of the N-Up tab page in the system independent print dialog. |
Online Discussion, Press Coverage and Comments
- Philipp Lohmann: One step forward, the next step back, blog posting, 2008-11-11
- Philipp Lohmann: New Print UI, blog posting, 2009-06-04
- Christoph Noack: Transparent Decision Making, blog posting, 2009-06-13
