Posted on 5 Comments

Revisiting the Printers Settings

If you read my announcement post or you are already running GNOME 3.24, you probably already know that there is a new Printers panel in GNOME Control Center. The new design is part of a big effort to modernize the Settings user interface.

After the 3.24 release we were able to gather more feedback from our users and, this way, cook up some improvements/enhancements to better suit their use-cases.

The main concern raised after the release was the discoverability of a printer in the list of printers. To tackle these issues we introduced two new features:

Search

Show recently added printer

yep, that’s a gif.

Another must-have feature that the printers panel never had and now is merged is the ability to undo a deletion of a printer.

Some users found it irrelevant to show the ink level bar when there’s no ink information to show, in doing so, we decided to hide it entirely for these cases.

In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that “Software is Never Done“. This is an evolving work which depends on various factors, including your feedback. Please, report bugs, suggest enhancements, and write patches, to make our desktop always better.

5 thoughts on “Revisiting the Printers Settings

  1. Could you explain what the printer ink levels mean?

    In the last screenshot, is there 1) only a little bit of cyan ink, or is there 2) a lot of cyan ink — a littlebit more than black ink?

    Why is there no magenta in that screenshot?

    1. Hi Jeremy, thanks for your question.

      These level bars are “Stacked Bar Charts”. Here
      is the data for that printer specifically:

      type……….name…………….color………………………level
      toner Canon C-EXV 49 Black Toner #000000 87
      toner Canon C-EXV 49 Cyan Toner #00FFFF 90
      toner Canon C-EXV 49 Magenta Toner #FF00FF 90
      toner Canon C-EXV 49 Yellow Toner #FFFF00 91

      So, to answer your questions directly:

      > In the last screenshot, is there 1) only a little bit of
      > cyan ink, or is there 2) a lot of cyan ink — a little
      > bit more than black ink?

      It is a stacked bar chart, so there is a lot of cyan ink
      (a little more than black ink).

      > Why is there no magenta in that screenshot?

      Coincidentally, this printer has the same amount of
      Cyan and Magenta ink, causing one of them to be
      hidden by the other. Bug?!?!

      If you want to check the implementation details, this
      code lives at https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/tree/panels/printers/pp-printer-entry.c#n247

  2. […] Revisiting the Printers Settings […]

    [WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The comment’s server IP (204.68.122.2) doesn’t match the comment’s URL host IP (204.68.122.43) and so is spam.

  3. Hi guys, nice work, I’m currently having an issue in an enterprise network with an SMB spool printer, it doesn’t detectit and I can’t add the url smb://urltoprinter/Server
    This new work covers that issue?

    Regards

    1. Yes, nowadays you should be able to type the printer url in the Add Printer dialog and it should show up. If not, please file a bug. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *