Is it me, or is most of the KDE printing framework missing in KDE 4.2?

The kprinter command is missing, no printer configuration, no queue, and, most importantly, there are no print preview option anywhere... Am I just missing some package?

as far as I've been able to determine you are correct, but you should be able to use the kde3 tools if they're installed.

Thanks for confirming.

Do you know what happened to them? They were really great applications in KDE 3...

I'm thinking it just hasn't been ported yet http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDEPrint/KDE4

That's a shame...

For printer configuration at least you can install system-config-printer-kde (I can't remember if this is KDE 4.2-only or if it was part of 4.1 too)

My biggest problem is not the configuration (that's what localhost:631 is for) but with the fact that I can't do a print preview - instead I have to go through "open print, select print to ps, open with okular, open print again, select the right printer..."

Ah, yeah. Then you're pretty much sunk until either KDEPrint is ported or Qt gains print previewing functionality.

KDEprint has not been touched in over a year. There was a note that it would be revisited when Qt 4.4 was released, but again, nothing has happened.

Fortunately, most functionality still exists in Qt itself. Using the Printer Applet in kdeutils, you get most of the rest back as well.

Hmm, printer-applet? I see it's masked on Gentoo, so I can't install it at the moment until they get the dependencies, but what does it do? Is that the same as the little icon in 3.5 that shows the window with the print queue?

Well, in any case, the only thing that really usets me at the moment is that there's no Print Preview functionality. I guess maybe I'll file a Feature Request for an interim solution to make saving to PS/PDF and then to printing it less tedious - since that's basically what you need for the most part. I'll probably do it sometime later, though, because I'm quite busy.

Printer-applet-kde is a printer job manager/queue window.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this.

I'm using kde 4.3.5 (kubuntu karmic).

Under kde 3.x both Firefox and Thunderbird could be setup to use kprinter for the print dialog. kprinter did almost exactly what I wanted it to do.

Now, kprinter doesn't work with kde4, and, last I heard, was waiting for some sort of updates to code maintained by Trolltech, or might not be fixed at all.

The new printer dialogs for these applications are terrible for me. Specifically:
Print Selection is hidden on an Option tab
Print to file file-name is reset every time so I have to do a bunch of extra typing every time I print
Print to File file-name doesn't show what files are matched by what you've typed so far, so I have to keep a dolphin tab open in the directory I use as my manual print queue and keep looking there to see what file name to use next. (I use 01, 02, 03, ...for file names so things print in order by default when I actually do the printing from the shell.)

kprinter did all of that "right"!

Is kprinter going to come back? Any idea when?

If it's subject to redesign, where can I post my preferences, etc.?

I print almost everything to file so I can run it through my duplex printing emulator for two sided printing on non-duplex printers (duplexpr on sourceforge), so I use the print to file option many times every day. I need one that works right!

Joe

Some of the functionality will be back in 4.5 and all of it should be back by 4.6. Also, Trolltech doesn't exist anymore, it was bought out by Nokia.

Thanks so much for the prompt reply.

So, good things come to those who wait (about a year, probably - until it's in kubuntu or ubuntu).

I hope it won't be too difficult to hook up with Firefox and Thunderbird. I tried it pre-kde4 and it was a bit confusing.

Joe

Unlikely to happen unless openSUSE decides to implement it, which they already said they won't because there are no real advantages to it. Maybe eventually.