My topic was not the usability of the print dialog. It can be improved, but to be honest I am not too thrilled by most mockups posted (the number of copies in the main dialog? It is “1″ 99% of the time)

Options vary from user to user, and simply posting your favourite subset as default is not what usability is about.

There are very good ideas here and I will point Christian Tibirna to this thread when he is back from LWCE SF where he is representing KDE Print.

1.) Moving the status to the dropdown (as suggested by Cyrille) sounds like a good idea, as it gives you the status instantly while selecting a printer (important for environments where a few identical printers are used by a workgroup, it’s important to know which printer is currently online/ offline/ busy)

2.) Don’t remove the ‘Location’, and, under no circumstances, remove the ‘Type’! Usually, the default names are not really sufficient/ not descriptive. It might be possible to change the dropdown to show “TYPE (NAME) - [STATUS ICON]“, for example: “Samsung ML-1510 (laser) - accepting jobs”…

3.) I would keep the “Options” and “System Options”, ideally using that fold-out dialog suggested by Daniel Molkentin ( http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1241 ) for ‘Options’. I think it’s save to move the ‘Keep this dialog…’ checkbox to the ‘Options’ fold-out, though.

4.) Leave the ‘Output file’ line as is. It’s very important for almost every user, as PDF’s are not really that uncommon. And it’s also better than a second popup to enter a filename appearing after you selected the PDF writer and hit ‘Print’ in the main print dialog.

5.) I like the idea to show a print preview. This feature is especially usefull for workgroup printers (I’ve seen people trying to print a plain A4 latter using an A3 color laser by mistake, that’s not only a waste of time, but also a serious waste of money - a preview would have at least shown that the selected printer might not be what the user wanted).

For the first time in my life, I can say today that I understand why human-interface researchers and designers stress this “fanciful” idea of task-based controls. Check out this post about the default KDE Print dialog:

Now, confront this...