Re: [lmi] Default printer paper size inappropriate for US

[Greg Chicares]

On 2006-11-16 13:48 UTC, Evgeniy Tarassov wrote:
> On 11/15/06, Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Apparently wx defaults to 'A4', while our country uses
>> something a little different. Rick suggests:

[snip patch--something similar should be in HEAD now]

> wxWidgets does ignore system printer settings and defaults to A4. I
> hope it will soon be fixed in wx MAIN and could be applied as a patch
> for lmi's wx version.

Probably we should upgrade wx for lmi before long,
instead of backpatching our working copies of wx.
I suspect users will consider lmi HEAD good enough
until then. Apparently the worst complaint would be
"I set a nondefault paper size, and it reverted to
a default the next time I printed something"
(AIUI--I didn't test it myself).

> wxWidgets printing facilities do not store any persistent settings,
> which means that whatever user changes will be discarded and replaced
> by the default values during the next run. That is the usual behaviour
> for most of the programs.

Here's a stray thought that I've never shared, though
it's been in the back of my mind for years: wx is a
GUI library, but doesn't offer a default application
"framework"--a full-featured wx application that does
nothing. Should it?

This was one nifty feature of a non-free library I
used years ago. In concept, you just wrote, e.g.,
  class MyApplication: public DefaultApplication {...
and you got some menus with standard menuitems like
'File | Save', corresponding buttons on a toolbar,
a default help file explaining those standard things,
a statusbar, and so on. [In practice, you ran an
application generator, answered a few questions, and
it assembled a program for you from boilerplate
snippets, using a macro language that made intercal
look elegant.] [In reality, the vendor abandoned
their library and was going to use wx instead, then
they abandoned their compiler, then I stopped paying
attention and now live happily in the free world.]

And it would automatically have a print-setup dialog
whose settings would automatically persist, IIRC.

I don't need it (I've figured all those things out
already from /wx/samples/, except for persistent
print settings I guess) but it might be useful for
people who are new to wx. Just a thought.

> If we want to persist the printing properties for lmi then we should
> either store it in configurable_settings, or save it using wxWidgets
> configuration tools (could be registry on windows and ini file on
> unix).

Yes, we already use wxConfig for that. We should save
printer settings there, I think.

> These settings could also be embed in the document files as it
> is done in most text editors, but i guess that when it comes to lmi
> the printer settings belong to user preferences.

I agree that we shouldn't tie it to a "document" for
lmi. I'd say it's a user setting that should be
stored by wxConfig, and modified by users through the
wx print dialog--our 'Page setup' menuitem, rather
than our 'Preferences' menuitem.

All of this belongs on the to-do list that I think
Wendy is taking charge of.