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Hi,

This isn't really a big deal but I thought it would be nice if Dolphin had a feature like that. It would allow the user to print things from the context menu, simply by right-clicking and without opening them. The advantage would be that it would make it easier to print many images, or PDFs at a time. (I thought of this because I just saw someone doing it on Windows with explorer and noticed it can't be done in Dolphin. It's not much of an issue for me though because I don't print a whole lot and if I had to do this I'd probably use the Terminal. Just thought it would be neat feature.)

Thanks,
Isaac

See also https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179189

This is non-trivial, actually...

The issue is that there is not "the" way how to interpret a given file such that you have a visual representation of the file content. That step, typically an interpretation of the content, is required for printing (either on the printer itself, less and less common, or on the controlling computer). But often the result different applications deliver differ. So which one is the "correct" one?
So in the end one would also need a configuration section to set "print output preparation filters" for each file type. Possible, but a little more complex than "just" a simple context menu entry. Especially because those entries would have to rely on installed applications which means the concept has to be linked to the software management system. Again, possible, but you see where this leads to...
On the other hand: most file types can be visualized using the "okular" document viewer application. Which again means once that one has a "headless operation feature" this might be enough as a backend for such a printing context menu entry.

I noticed that Windows implements this by launching the application in charge of reading that type of file and apparently passing to it some kind of parameter telling it to just print the file and then close. So if you do this with Word files you'll see Word open for a moment and then immediately close itself again. I don't know how feasible such a thing might be in our case. However, there must be some way of visualizing most ordinary file types in Plasma as Dolphin does quite efficiently when the "Previews" feature is enabled. Does it use Okular for that?

arkascha wrote:This is non-trivial, actually...

Ironically, just a day or two after I wrote the original post, the situation of printing a bunch of images came up for me. I ended up installing a plugin in Gwenview which allows printing images en masse. So yes, I agree it is non-trivial.