Print Dialog: Add support for the Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB)

[Till Kamppeter]

Ilmari, thank you very much for taking this into the Engineering 
Steering Committee (ESC) meeeting today! And buovjaga to suggest this on 
IRC.

Thorsten, thank you very much for your detailed meeting minutes and the 
quick posting of them.

Heiko, there will be no UI change at all. The changes are only how the 
dialog gets

- The list of available printers
- For a printer selected by the user
    o The list of user-settable options with the available choices for
      each option (like Media Source: Tray 1, Tray 2, Bypass Tray, ...)
    o The list of all page sizes with unprintable margins, for correct
      previews
    o A job sent to the printer

This will not done any more by the dialog directly talking to CUPS. but 
to the CPDB libraries. What the user sees and how they operate it will 
not change.

This should not really be "massive" changes. As an example, here is the 
Merge Request for the CPDB support om the GTK dialog:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4930

And the commit on LibreOffice back in 2017, with the very first version 
of CPDB:

https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/40565

Heiko, and thanks for stepping up to help mentoring on the UI/UX side, 
so if there is a change on the UI needed (low probablility) or the 
switch to CPDB would help for a better UI, your insight would help us a lot!

Heiko, could you provide me your full name and e-mail address, so that I 
can invite you?

Generally, we can invite and line up mentors at any time until the end 
of the coding, but I would appreciate a lot for anyone to step up before 
the ranking deadline, as the higher our number of mentors lined up, the 
higher the chances that we get our requested slot count, and so assure 
that very project we want to run will actually take place.

Also the sooner we get someone stepping up, the sooner Kushagra can 
start working and has someone to talk to on the LibreOffice side.

To step up, please tell me your full name and e-mail address, so that I 
can invite you and you can register in Google's web app. Only condition 
is that you do not participate as a contributor/student in this year's GSoC.

I hope we will have a great collaboration here.

    Till


On 06/04/2023 18:16, Thorsten Behrens wrote:

[...]

 > * GSoC (Ilmari)
 >    + Who wants to join OpenPrinting as a mentor: 
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2023-April/090210.html
 >      + Till Kamppeter's proposal for collaboration on adding support 
for the Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB)
 >
 >        + mostly co-mentoring & backup, navigating LibO code
 >
 >        + will check (Hossein)
 >
 >        + slighty concerned with UI changing via openprinting (Heiko)
 >
 >        + careful to change things massively... (Heiko)
 >
 >        + willing to co-mentor for UI/UX too (Heiko)
 >
 >        + AI interested mentors, please poke Till!
 >
 >   + timeline: 27th of April ranking needs to be done
 >   + mentors being invited, joining the org

[...]


On 04/04/2023 19:33, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> LibreOffice is one of the few applications which have their own print 
> dialog, and do not use one of the desktop environment toolkit's (GTK/Qt) 
> ones primarily (AFAIR one can use the GTK one optionally, selecting in 
> the settings).

[...]

> As this is most probably not the last major change needed and also for 
> print dialogs to support other print technologies than CUPS, for example 
> cloud printing services, I have created already 5 years ago, the concept 
> of the Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB):
> 
> https://openprinting.github.io/achievements/#common-print-dialog-backends
> 

[...]