[8.04] system-config-printer-applet should hide automatically when printing is complete

[Dylan McCall]

Binary package hint: system-config-printer

When a document is printed, system-config-printer-applet appears with a notification area icon. However, when printing is complete, the icon does not disappear. The user must manually right click on the icon and choose Hide for it to ever go away.
When printing is complete, the tool serves little purpose and is not actually notifying the user of anything. By being visible in the notification area, it is quite confusing; it appears that the printer should be active, when in fact it is not.

Unless instructed otherwise via the command line, this tool should automatically hide its notification area icon when all print jobs are complete. If the user wants more information that is available in that program, he can open it in the main menu under System Tools.

[Tim Waugh (twaugh)]

Patch welcome. Things that need to be considered:

- the icon is needed for attaching notifications to, so we need to be sure there are no outstanding notifications when hiding it

- new notifications need to make the icon visible again in order to attach them to it

- we also super-impose warning/error symbols onto that icon, so we need to make sure to avoid hiding the icon in that situation as well

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

Please, keep in mind that:

- The applet behavior has changed since Feisty (IMO, I prefer the Feisty behavior), so the user could see that change as rather strange when he/she upgrades from Feisty to Gutsy.

- If you hide the applet (via right-click on the icon and selecting "Hide"), you can't show it again, and it no longer shows when you print a document. There's no easy way to return back the icon again.

I think it's a regression from Feisty. My opinion is that this is a confirmed bug.

[Francesco Potortì (pot)]

Additionally, the behaviour of having a "hide" command is dangerous per se, because you can happen to choose it by mistake and not knowing how to revert to showing the icon.

I am in this situation. Anyone knows a way to show back the printer icon?

[Raphael J. Schmid (raphael-j-schmid)]

Just print a test page...

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

If I send a document to the printer when the icon is hidden, the icon does not appears...

[Raphael J. Schmid (raphael-j-schmid)]

Hmm, for me it appears whenever I print something, but I usually have a reboot in between that...

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

See the developer's blog. A commenter complains about the 'Hide' option:

http://cyberelk.net/tim/2007/04/05/printer-status-feedback/

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

Just for clarify, there're two different issues in this bugreport:

1. The tray icon should hide automatically when printing is complete.
2. When you hide the icon (clicking on 'Hide'), the icon must appear again when you send a document to the printer.

Maybe there could be two different bugreports...

[Tim Waugh (twaugh)]

I've included a change for this in system-config-printer-0.7.78.

[Raphael J. Schmid (raphael-j-schmid)]

Very cool - thanks a lot, Tim!

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

Could the change be backported to Gutsy?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

system-config-printer (0.7.78+svn1740-0ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

  * New upstream release
     o Subversion snapshot r1740
     o Do not require PNG format for desktop icons (LP: #152634)
     o Applet: Throttle the rate of checking for jobs or error messages when in
       start-up mode. This prevents the applet being a nuisance when a large
       number of CUPS administration operations are performed in a batch.
     o Be more tolerant on failures to obtain printer info from CUPS.
     o Better check for whether the CUPS server is local.
     o Better methods to find default printer.
     o Applet: Allow the tray icon to reappear on the next print job when the
       user has hidden the applet icon with right-click -> "Hide" (LP: #156816).
     o Applet: Hide icon automatically when print job ends (LP: #151360).
  * debian/patches/10_menu_entries.patch: Regenerated.

 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:02:25 +0000

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

system-config-printer (0.7.78+svn1771-0ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

  * New upstream release
     o Subversion snapshot r1771
     o Added support for setting up queues pointing to Mac OS X printers,
       detected with the dnssd CUPS backend.
     o Allow deleting of remote queues, so that queues pointing to Mac OS X
       printers can get deleted again.
     o Fixed handling of auto-detected IPP queues in the "New printer" wizard.
     o Fixed traceback when creating a raw queue.
     o Fixed "New Printer" notifications after they got broken by the icon
       hiding changes for LP: #151360 and LP: #156816.
     o For C/POSIX locale, show only English PPDs.
     o Include PPD language in driver description (LP: #161037).
     o If there are no jobs but there is a printer warning/error indicated
       by the tray icon, set the icon tooltip to the reason description.
     o In the printer status window fix columns so that the full printer name
       can be seen.
     o Set printer icon in "Connect" dialog.
     o Set AboutDialog logo by icon name, set URL and email hooks, set icon
       (LP: #165101).
     o In the printer status window set Ctrl+R accelerator for Refresh menu
       entry (LP: #137984).

 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:40:08 +0000

[bgruber (bgruber)]

I'm seeing this problem again in Jaunty, system-config-printer-gnome 1.1.3+git20090218-0ubuntu19. Now, the hide menu option seems to do nothing.

[Anonym25712 (anonym25712)]

I can confirm that the icon now stays forever in my systray. I have to "quit" it to remove it.

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

I see the same bahavior as bgruber. The icon remains in the notification area, it doesn't hide automatically, and the Hide menu option does nothing.

Using 1.1.3+git20090218-0ubuntu19 in Jaunty.

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

I've just opened a new bugreport (bug #373208) about the two issues:

- Icon doesn't autohide
- The Hide menu option is useless

Please, can anybody confirm that bugreport? Thanks.

[bgruber (bgruber)]

actually, this problem magically went away for me somehow, so i can't confirm the new bug report.

[Anonym25712 (anonym25712)]

> actually, this problem magically went away for me somehow, so i can't confirm the new bug report

Are you sure it's completely fixed? On my system, it seems quite random: sometimes it auto-hides, sometimes it doesn't. I couldn't find a reproducible pattern.

[Ricardo Pérez López (ricardo)]

Is there anybody using the HPLIP service?

[eld1e6o (eld1e6o)]

In my computer it's working fine (the auto-hide function)... In yours?

[Anonym25712 (anonym25712)]

No, it just happened again: The printer icon was semi-transparent in my systray, and the hide option had no effect at all. I had to choose 'quit'.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Marking this bug for Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as Fix Released.
Please use bug #373208 for Ubuntu 9.04 and higher.