663750 - [UX] Implement document grid view for Print Preview

Status: NEW

(Core :: Print Preview, enhancement)

Description

[Michael Ventnor]

Another enhancement I want to make to Print Preview is to take advantage of the large width and resolution of some screens.

Today, we always vertically list each page in a print preview. But we should do like LibreOffice does, and fit as many pages as we can horizontally (normally 2) in the print preview window.

Comment 1

[Michael Ventnor]

Attachment: Patch

I'd like to know exactly why we suppress incremental reflow on page sequence frames, as I have a feeling this may no longer be necessary. I couldn't find any code in the table renderers that stood out.

Printing still works, and I've tested quite a few sites including ones that use tables and couldn't find a problem.

Comment 2

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

We don't handle incremental reflows of tables split across page boundaries. It may be that the incremental reflows of the page-sequence-frame don't allow those tables to be incrementally reflowed, but I'm not sure.

Instead of adding functionality to nsSimplePageSequenceFrame to handle these features, I'd really like to go in a different direction for print preview. I'd like to make the print preview window be a XUL document containing a XUL element for each page, with a hidden print presentation for the print-previewed document, and the XUL page elements hooked up to each render one page of that presentation. The print-preview layout presentation would go away completely, simplifying layout a bit. That would let us add features to make print preview more interactive, such as selecting pages to print. It would also let us change print preview from being a modal UI to spinning out a separate window (or tab). It's quite a lot of work but it seems to me it would put us in a better place, where adding functionality to print-preview doesn't require frame layout hacking.

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

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