Flake and printing

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Flake and printing
by Charles de Miramon on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @02:52

Is flake going to solve the printing diabilities of KOffice ? I would love to use KSpread but I have always been seriously annoyed by the complexity to go from the screen to a nice A4 printed sheet.

Creating a well balanced set of printed sheets of paper is certainly not easy
but KOffice seems to have structural problems on this matter.

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Office Suite
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Re: Flake and printing
by Thomas Zander on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @04:02

> Is flake going to solve the printing diabilities of KOffice

Yes, it already makes printing a lot better for a lot of different issues. Flake will generate PDFs directly and solve lots of issues with regards to printing in one go.

I currently do not know how kspread will use flake, thats still in the future, but the printing issue will certainly be kept in mind when developers start to take advantage of flake.

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Re: Flake and printing
by superstoned on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @04:03

I'm sure Koffice 2 (based on KDE 4/Qt4) will be better in this area. But maybe you would like to elaborate about what is wrong, exactly?

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Re: Flake and printing
by Charles de Miramon on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @04:27

Look the TeX algorithms.

When you print a text on a sheet of paper, you often cheat with geometry (because your eyes will not see the difference). You squeeze a line a little more, expand there a little, zoom a little bit this graphic. The TeX algorithms use the concept of penalties. It is a different logic that representing something on a screen which is just an infinite space.

The danger is thinking that going from the screen to the sheet of paper is just applying a mathematical transformation.

I would argue to make it possible in KOffice 2.0 to plug in a page creation algorithm. Maybe somebody will step in at some point and write one taking inspiration from the published and tested TeX mechanisms.

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Re: Flake and printing
by Thomas Zander on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @05:36

I know the algorithms, sure. But I'm afraid I need a little more explanation on where you think Tex is usefull to get a kspread sheet on paper.
I only see the use for text areas, not for loads and loads of cells.

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Re: Flake and printing
by Charles de Miramon on Tuesday 06/Jun/2006, @09:49

Well, TeX works with horizontal and vertical lists of boxes with spaces between boxes that are called glue or coils (I do not remember) and then cut this list in pages.

I guess that similar algorithms could apply for printing tables in KSpread.

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