Printing from Opera

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:48:40 -0400, Rod Person wrote:
> Out of curiosity, when I got how I fired up Opera 11.50 and took these screen shots.
> 
> You can see that I have a Print to LPR option and you can set the command line.

Yes - that seems to be the KDE printing dialog. I did just
rebuild Opera (which installed _lots_ of stuff, kdelibs and
other KDE and Qt related things, and stuff that I've never
heared of, no idea what it is and what I should need it for,
e. g. Sesame, Rasqal, Soprano, Botan and Grantlee - it's
just you're talking how to solve "Maniac Mansion II: Day Of
The Tentacle" with a friend on a public bus!). Really, naming
"modern" software products makes you sound silly. :-)



> But it seem it does stay saved and you have to type in the command every time.

The standard command _is_ lpr, so this should be fine. I've
tried _all_ the dialogs, going to "opera:config" Registry,
and changing numerical values.

The explainations for "Dialog Toolkit" are a bit scary:

0 = Autodetect toolkit to use for file selector
1 = Use Qt for file selector (dprecated, will fall back to KDE)
2 = Use GTK for file selector
3 = Use KDE for file selector
4 = Use X11 for file selector

Note that althoug the key "Dialog Toolkit" is categorized
in "File Selector", it does _also_ affect the printing dialog!
Furthermore, it affects how the menus and colors look like.

Oh... deprecated!!! The only file saving dialog that worked in
a halfway accessible manner is now DEPRECATED! Great!

I tried the Gtk file dialog, it has bad keyboard support, is
slow and doesn't allow fast actions. The KDE dialog is also
unusable. And if Opera starts, there are a lot of error
messages related to KDE (as I'm not using it maybe?). There
is no ".." entry anymore (too complicated for "average users"?),
and the GTK file dialog doesn't even allow easy overwriting
a file name (selection just covers prefix, not full entry).

This is how it looked like in previous versions:

+-------------------------- Save as ---------------------------+
|                                                              |
|  Look in: _#_/var/tmp_________________ [<] [^] [°]  [::][=]  |
|                                                              |
|  # ..                * a_saved_file.html                     |
|  # some_directory    * another_file_html                     |
|  # another one                                               |
|                                                              |
|  File name: blabla.html_________________________ [  Save  ]  |
|                                                              |
|  File type: HTML file (*.htm, *.html)            [ Cancel ]  |
|                                                              |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Note that the upper field can be addressed per keyboard, so
you can change the path there - or you enter a path (as prefix
or only entry) in the lower field.

The dialog I got after installation with KDE and GTK backends
_not_ selected was a poor implementation of that dialog, but
it worked, even though there are strange things like Places
and File system that I don't understand what they are to be
used for. Waste of space on screen seems to be "modern".

The old Opera 8.54 printing dialog had a tab to specify a printer
program and its parameters. This seems also DEPRECATED, so if
you want it, you need KDE... or what?



> Dialog:
> http://rodperson.com/DL/2011-08-24-174109_1680x1050_scrot.png

Exactly that's what I get, and if I enter a job, it is shown
for a short time in the lpq output, but the printer does not
print anything. Then the queue is empty.

And even as I now have those dialogs, and made all settings
as one would expect, in the _result_, nothing is printed.
No error messages (checked xterm calling Opera) appear.

There is just one printer. It's the only one on the list.
It _has_ to be manually (!) selected before I am able to
send the print job. Standard procedure ^P and Enter also
seems to be DEPRECATED...



Summary: Printing still does not work. And file dialog got worse.



I will try to make a workaround by using the "Print to file"
mechanism to pipe it directly into the printer somehow.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...