Ubuntu's printing queue is not user friendly

[nh2]

Binary package hint: system-config-printer-gnome

The printing queue can make simple user's live quite hard for the following reasons:

- It seems you can only delete one job at a time. If for some reason 400 wrong jobs were started, happy clicking.
- You cannot delete jobs with the keyboard and need at least two clicks per job,
- Command names are somewhat ambiguous. I have "Delete" and "Abort" for each job and they seem to do exactly the same thing.

I propose the following solution:
- We could make it possible to select multiple jobs so that you can delete them at once.
- We could register a handler on the Del key to trigger job deletion.
- We could remove one of the ambiguous entries in case they are equivalent.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

This is an upstream bug/feature request, forwarding to upstream maintainer Tim Waugh ...

[Tim Waugh (twaugh)]

Till, please file upstream bugs using the upstream bug tracker, not launchpad. Also: please make sure you have verified that the bug applies to the most recent upstream version before doing so. In this case, I believe it is already fixed upstream.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Tim, the first time I have seen it I probably got many bug reports and simply pinged you after reading the description.

I have tested it now and the situation is the following:

One can actually do operations on more then one job, simply moving the mark to the first job to operate on, via the cursor keys or left-clicking and to the last job using Shift and cursor keys or left-clicking with Shift. Then one clicks the desired operation in the tool bar or the right-click menu and confirms.

Pure keyboard operation does not work. One can select jobs with the keyboard, but one needs the mouse to perform the operation. Del to remove the marked jobs would be great.

The current cersion has "Cancel" and "Delete". What is the difference? One of the two should be removed or it should be told clearly what the difference is.

[Jiri Popelka (jpopelka)]

> The current version has "Cancel" and "Delete". What is the difference?
> One of the two should be removed or it should be told clearly what the difference is.

CUPS 1.4 adds a new purge-job (boolean) attribute to the Cancel-Job operation
that allows to purge both active and completed jobs, removing all history and document files for the job as well.
See
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/spec-ipp.html#CANCEL_JOB

So when you "Delete" the job, the job is canceled (if it's active) and all job files (history and document) are purged.
I called it "Purge" at the first time, then we renamed it to "Delete".
Do you have any more describing name for it ?

Originally it was requested here
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/system-config-printer/+bug/158487

[Jiri Popelka (jpopelka)]

> Del to remove the marked jobs would be great.
https://fedorahosted.org/system-config-printer/ticket/212

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I would say

Cancel Job

and

Cancel Job and Remove from Job History

as the two options in the right click menu of the view of active jobs and

Remove from Job History

in the view of the history of done jobs.

[Tim Waugh (twaugh)]

Hmm, that's quite long. How about this instead?:

Cancel Job
Cancel And Remove Job

Remove Job

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

OK. Let us go this way.

[Tim Waugh (twaugh)]

How about an even simpler approach: "Cancel" is only available for active jobs, and "Delete" is only available for inactive jobs. Isn't that clear then?

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

What about having only one option "Cancel/Delete" with a dialog with 3 buttons that explains the possibilities:

Cancel/Delete job
----------------
Do you want to keep or cancel this job?
Aditionally you can delete this job and its document from the history of completed jobs.
----------------
Cancel and Delete | Keep | Cancel

(when no history is kept it should only show "Cancel" option with dialog that fits that)

When viewing list of completed jobs this should change to only "Delete" option with dialog:

Delete job
----------------
Do you want to keep or delete this job and its document from the history of completed jobs?
----------------
Keep | Delete

It would also be nice to have the Delete key bound to "Cancel/Delete" then since this action is used so often and people expect that to work (Shift+F10+C/D isn't that intuitive).

Doesn't this give all functionallity and make everything clear to the user?

[Ivan Baldo (ibaldo)]

Also, I don't understand why when you double click on a printer instead of going to that printer queue it goes to the printer preferences... 98% of the time the user wants to see the queue and cancel jobs, not reconfigure de printer...