Customizable Print Formats GSoC 2015

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 3 March 2015 at 01:10, Gehad Elrobey <gehadelrobey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As Subsurface became a mentoring organization in GSoC '15  so I am willing
> to join this year under Subsurface organization.
>
> I am interested in the idea of "Adding customizable print formats".
> I am specially interested in this idea as subsurface lacks good printing
> capabilities and also this project will be some how related to the HTML
> codebase I wrote in my project last year.
>
> Before I start writing my proposal I would like to know the community's (and
> Lubomir for sure as the mentor) opinions and expectations about the project?
> and what do you think is missing mainly in the current printing system?
>

some random thoughts,

i would agree that some research and user feedback is needed here,
since as a non-user the current printing capabilities seem static but
sufficient to me!
the facebook share is even less flexible than what we have for
printing. perhaps it's possible to unify the backend for social
network share layouting and the print layouting, since doing a
printout is probably for the purpose of sharing:

- ShareLayout could be the backend for what i describe
- a ShareLayout will determine the social network share or printout layout
- having or not having the profile or the table could be a toggle
option in ShareLayout
- ShareLayoutOptions could be the frontend that the user interacts
with and it generates a ShareLayout
- the current PrintLayout could arrange ShareLayouts e.g. user defined
NxM layouts
- the facebook share will upload a single ShareLayout

i would ditch the QTablexxxxxx implementations completely and
implement a custom QPainter that is HTML template based (and probably
quite slow).
Tomaz at some point proposed a Qt template library for custom
printing, but i don't like the idea of adding even more dependencies
to Subsurface. if others approve of that, i would do the same.

this part from the ideas page is important:
"But the team is open to other ideas that solve the underlying
problem: being able to customize the print output to include the
information that the user perceives as relevant and giving the user
control over major style elements like font sizes and positioning of
the various data."

i think, before you start writing the proposal users should provide
feedback on what level of customization they want from the print
layouting.
Davide, Robert - any ideas?

lubomir
--

p.s. please mind there is a chance that i could be AFK for weeks
during the GSoC period.