If John Layt, who I'm sure is a perfectly nice gentleman and competent programmer, can only find the time to make infrequent commits then he probably should not be the lead developer on the project.

Just so you know, John Layt did create quite a lot of printing code - except he did it for Qt, not KDE. So before we could see it, it would need to be accepted and merged into Qt.

You can see his work here:
http://qt.gitorious.org/~odysseus/qt/odysseus-clone/

And you can see his blog here:
http://www.layt.net/john/