Customizable Print Formats GSoC 2015

Lubomir I. Ivanov neolit123 at gmail.com
Wed Mar 4 04:56:00 PST 2015


On 4 March 2015 at 07:52, Gehad Elrobey <gehadelrobey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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:
>
>
> In my opinion facebook sharing is limited to show a dive profile (with some
> dive photos if they exist) and add the remaining data to the photo caption,
> while printing on the other hand needs to be highly customizable to be able
> to use every space in the paper. Please correct me if I am wrong(I don't use
> the feature as a user).
>

at some point facebook users may want a table attached to the profile picture.
the caption can cover things like biddies, location etc, but i don't
think it's suitable for everything.
but if captions in social networks are sufficient for the extra dive
data then there is no point of attaching a table to the profile
picture.

some (questionable) forward thinking in terms of backend.

>>
>> - 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
>>
>
> Can you clarify this part more please, I don't get how user data will be
> mapped to the ShareLayout?

ShareLayout is fed dive data (struct dive) and layout data (e.g. HTML).
based on that a ShareLayout can render a visual of the provided data.

this is something i would do to suit both the social network demands
and the print demands.
but if the social network backend abstraction is not needed we can
rename / adjust the class names.

>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I am interested in using HTML templates that gives high customization to the
> prints, while the library Tomaz has proposed seems to be very good too. I
> think we may need Dirk's opinion about the dependency.
>

i've tried compiling the Grantlee on Windows and it works, but i
haven't tested it.
out of time ATM.

>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I am going to ask for more user input in subsurface user forum.

sounds good.

lubomir
--


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