Printing - the forbidden subject

[markem]

Ok. I know this is probably a forbidden subject - but......

There are some good reasons to be able to print a document. Let me count a few.

1. You want to mark up the document but you are going to your great-great-great grand parent's house and all they have are chopped wood and lanterns. What are you to do? You print out the part of the document you want to work on and bring a quill, parchment, and ink pot.
2. You want to mark up the document and your company says you can't have the document on your computer at work and you can't bring in any kind of electronic device.
3. You just really like holding paper, chewing on the edges, getting cheap ink smudged onto your fingers.
4. You'd like to have a PDF document on the document but you can't because Zeal doesn't have a print facility built in to it.

So. To be real - in case my internet went down for unknown reasons (like I haven't paid in months and the government's rules do not cover internet access so I'm just out of luck) but my computer is working fine. If I could have printed a PDF document then I could look at it when I need to do so.

NOW. Do I mean "Create a PDF print option"???? NO. I do NOT mean that. I mean just a standard printer dialog to just print a file to a given device. I have BullZIP and BullZIP will produce a PDF document for me. My problem is - Zeal just doesn't have any kind of way to print anything to anywhere at anytime.

Now - Zeal does a fantastic job of making, showing, and doing other things. But it just doesn't have a print option yet - every operating system has print capabilities. And yeah-yeah-yeah...save the trees, and "we are beyond needing a printout", and whatever. Great for you but - I'm not you. Neither are hundreds and thousands and millions of other people. And I have seen and read the "We are beyond earthly needs" speeches. Well - great for you. I was born in the age when one computer took up an entire building. No calculators - not even slide rulers. No - I was born into the paper and pencil time frame. I bought one of the first calculators (from Sears). I bought an Apple ][+. So I'm old...the dust of centuries lies on me. Don't sneeze! I need all the brain cells I have. No - really - don't. :-)

Ok - jokes aside - in every program I have ever written or run or used there is something which, for whatever reason, is left out of the program. Usually because someone decides they just don't need it. For Zeal - that "something" is to be able to print something out. Nothing special. Nothing exceptional. Just a plain print option using the standard printing method. Whatever it is on whatever OS someone happens to be using. If that was done then all of those other programs which use the printing process could then be used without Zeal having to keep up with them. Instead, you just say "You need to talk to X about there problems."

So what do you say? Can we get a print command? A standard print? Maybe a Page Setup (not sure if you have to have that also). You could even throw in a Print Preview if you wanted to do so.

Last - I am very sure this has been brought up at least a few thousand times. If so and the answer is no - so be it but it is still a good idea. Just a standard Print command, maybe a Page Setup and Print Preview. That is all I am asking for.

Thanks for reading.

Mark

PS: I also mean to be able to print all sub-folders. So like Defold could be printed and that prints all of the subfolders under that folder. Just a FYI. :-)

[David-Else]

It would be great! I tried to ask the VS Code people to enable printing, no luck, it seems 'out of fashion' to print anything! :)

I have tried and failed to get a decent workflow for printing parts of websites nicely, but the documents lack <div style="page-break-after: always;"></div> so pages will split in the middle of things. The best attempt so far has been modifying the HTML in Chromium dev tools then printing to PDF... and then the printer.

[trollixx]

I believe with Qt WebEngine this is now quite doable, will investigate after v0.7.0 is out.