Developer Tutorial

Author: Michael Goffioul

Welcome to the KDEPrint tutorial for application developers. This tutorial is mainly intended for KDE application developers that want to learn about KDEPrint and what they can do with it. KDEPrint is an already well established technology in the KDE world but, with a few exceptions, KDE developers are not aware of all the KDEPrint's features and what they can expect from it. This tutorial explains some of the basic and advanced features of KDEPrint.

Each section of this tutorial explains one feature of KDEPrint, and illustrates it with code examples. Most of these code examples have been extracted from a small demo application developed in parallel with this text. The code can be found here. Remember that is only a demonstration application, a sandbox for showcasing key features of KDEPrint (Note: code examples given in this tutorial have been simplified for more clarity, compared to the real code, where necessary).

This tutorial is still Work-In-Progress and help to improve it will be much appreciated. So it would be nice if I could hear a little bit from you after reading this. Just tell me your impressions, if you found it useful, which parts were not clear enough, what should be reworked,... This tutorial was written by goffioul@imec.be but now it is better to bug me, Cristian Tibirna <tibirna@kde.org> about it.

Note also that this tutorial is far from complete, and does not cover all features of KDEPrint. Only the most important features are covered (I'll add probably some other sections later), but if you want a complete information about KDEPrint, I suggest you to have a look at the various installed headers: kprinter.h, kprintaction.h, kdeprint/*.h (note that some headers are only useful for plugin developers, which is not the goal here). You can also access the KDEPrint API online here. You will need KDE3 to build and run this demo application.

The different sections of this tutorial are the following, in order of increasing difficulty:

• Basic usage
• Advanced page selection
• Customization of the print dialog
• Automatic preview mechanism
• Print actions (document exporting)

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