Bug#430913: evince: Evince fails to remember "Print Setup" settings

[Kevin Brown]

Sven Arvidsson wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 01:00 -0700, Kevin Brown wrote:
>> Evince requires that you set the paper size in the "Print Setup" dialog.
>>
>> This dialog defaults everything to A4 paper.  As I'm in the US, I use US 
>> Letter.
>>
>> Switching these settings does work for any print jobs I initiate while 
>> evince is up, but the settings aren't persistent across restarts of 
>> evince.  They need to be.
> 
> Evince, by way of the GTK+ printing backends, should use the default
> letter size set by your locale;
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450487

Hmm...well, my locale is "POSIX".  In other words, I don't set one.  The 
reason I don't set one is that terminal programs such as xterm aren't 
aware of UTF-8 and don't properly render certain punctuation characters 
when the locale is set to en_US.UTF-8.

> As for changing this default, I'm not sure if this should be done per
> application or with a desktop wide setting for GTK.

I'm not really as concerned about the default, so much as I am the fact 
that Evince doesn't remember any changes you make in the dialog, and 
this is inconsistent with Epiphany (which also uses gtkprint).

Epiphany (the browser) remembers your settings properly, and this is how 
Evince should behave as well (but see below).  I'm of the opinion that 
the settings in question should be remembered for all GTK applications, 
such that the changes in one application will be reflected at startup of 
the other application, since the settings in question are designed to 
cause the print output to conform to the paper in the printer.


That said, I'm also of the opinion that the way GTK printing currently 
works is broken.  There should be three layers of printer settings:

1.  The printer itself (e.g., CUPS or whatever).
2.  The user's global preferences, both for all printers and on a 
per-printer basis, as set from a control panel applet the way all such 
per-user preferences are set.
3.  The application's settings.

And these should all be handled the same way.  Right now printing in 
Gnome is an absolute mess.  Each application seems to have a slightly 
different way of handling it.  I've looked at gedit, gnumeric, epiphany, 
evince, dia, galeon, and gnome-dictionary, and they all handle printing 
slightly differently.

What's currently in the print settings dialog really belongs in a tab in 
the print dialog, because it's something that has a reasonable chance of 
being changed by the user on a per-job basis.  I'm inclined to say that 
the paper settings should be remembered across invocations of the 
program because the user may have a specific preference for them with 
respect to that application (a "save" button on that tab would make this 
behaviour, if implemented, obvious, and a "revert to defaults" button 
would make it possible to restore the behaviour to a more traditional 
behaviour).


-- 
Kevin Brown					      kevin at sysexperts.com