Printerpullpages/Idea Collection

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This page is part of the CWS printerpullpages. It collects ideas which may later get evaluated and even integrated. You are invited to add your 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...
Rough mockup of a contextual information bar

On the other hand, it would be better to get rid of all these additional informations, warnings and decisions. Open Questions:

  • If people print via shortcut, then the print dialog is omitted. What to do?
  • If native dialogs are used, then we miss the flexibility to add this kind of warning.
 ??? 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.
2009-06-14 Regina multiple copies of a one page document on one paper sheet New Use case: You need a lot of DIN A5 sheets to distribute flyers or for to give the sheets to your pupils in your classroom. You write a DIN A5 document. But DIN A5 paper is more expensive than DIN A4 paper. So you want to print the same document twice on a DIN A4 paper. That is not possible up to now. Besides the Issue 67687 , have a look in the internet forums, you see that people are searching for that feature but get only workarounds or have to buy special software. For example http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=65019 or http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=30747 or the workaround for Word http://www.gmayor.com/print_multiple_copies.htm
2009-06-16 Regina Assistance for envelope printing New Printing envelopes still belongs to the tasks which most failures. OOo should use informations about the printer (for example from the PPD-file) to help the users. For example, OOo can show how to insert the envelop, or show, what position the envelope must have compared with the standard paper sheet.
2009-07-04 Christoph Merge change tracking and notes New Issue: In Writer, currently there is no common handling for the printing of Notes or handling of Change Tracking. If tracked changes are enabled in the document, they are also printed. There is no way to enable/disable these „reviewer markups“.

Proposal: Maybe something to change/merge for further releases? Open Question: Maybe also Calc is affected, since it also supports change tracking.

2009-08-09 Christoph Further harmonize printing options New Issue: Why should we provide "Colors" (original colors, grayscale, black&white) to Draw/Impress only? Does it make sense to make it available to all document types?

Proposal: Harmonize the options.

2009-08-09 Christoph Easy handling of printing options defaults New Issue: Usually (but not always!), the settings of printing options which are located in the printing dialog are saved on a per document bases. Settings located in the Tools - Options are made available to all newly created documents. But, many people are not aware of this fact.

Proposal: If we don't go for printer setting presets, it might make sense to add a functionality in the printing dialog to make these settings persistent (to e.g. store defaults like in Tools -- Options).

2009-10-07 Regina Inform the user when selected sheets have print range "none"  ??? Issue: The user might not know, why a worksheet is not printed although he has selected it. So an information like "5 worksheets have print range "none" and are not printed" would be helpful. For details of this problem see Issue 47600 and discussion "Issue 47600 Calc : default print ranges" on discuss@ux.openoffice.org
2009-12-01 Regina Inform the user about the actual paper sheet size and maybe about document page or selection size.  ??? Issue: The automatically chosen paper sheet size might be surprising. Sometimes the user cannot even guess the size, because an automatic scaling happens. Issue 107331 Therefore show at least the actual paper size near the preview. Here are two proposals, one using a measure line, the other using text.
Mockup of measure lines for paper sheet size
Mockup of text about paper sheet size and document size
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