Usability Issue: Create A PDF Document: Save as

[Pascal de Bruijn]

When printing with a GNOME application, users can select 'Create A PDF Document'.

Now the default ouput Location is '~/output.pdf', that's very easy to code, but
it's not really all the logical for the users, I would suggest something like this:

1. Output by default not to ~ but to the directory in which the file which is
being printed to PDF resides
2. Select the originating filename and add .pdf to it (and maybe possible a date)

Example:
--------

Source file: ~/Documents/test.txt

   PDF file: ~/Documents/test.txt.pdf
or PDF file: ~/Documents/test_20051211.pdf

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug, that would be a nice change. I've forwarded it upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326961

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

The title and description of this bug may need to be updated to reflect changes that have been made to PDF workflow since the bug was filed.

In Jaunty, GNOME print dialogs have a "Print to File" printer available in the Print dialog. When you select this printer, the output file's suggested name is "output.pdf" and the suggested locations is the user's home directory.

"output" is jargon, has the potential to collide with another file of the same name in the destination directory, and is difficult to remember as it has no relation to the name of the file being saved as PDF. Incorporating the source file's name in the output filename as the reporter suggests seems like a great improvement.

Saving to the user's home directory is reasonable, but the Desktop is a more accessible location. We may also want to consider saving the PDF to the same directory as the source file.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

libgnomeprint is not used in jaunty and will be dropped from the default installation in karmic, you want to consider opening a new bug describing the current issues

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

A papercut is a small fix - this feels like a much larger one. The
platform team should push back on "papercuts" that involve complex effort.

Mark

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

Maybe instead of viewing this as too large to be a paper cut, we could
split it into several distinct paper cuts. For example:

 1. Default to PDF format. I imagine this is a 1 line diff against the
code driving the Gtk print dialog.
 2. Place output files on Desktop instead of HOME by default. This might
be another 1 line diff against the same codebase.

These would be great to fix even if reusing the source filename as the
output filename is too large to be a paper cut. Of course, if we have to
patch every application that uses the Gtk print dialog, this is out of
the question.