263315 - Object in the printer dialog should follow workflow top to bottom

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Peter Weilbacher]

The upper part of the printer dialog is currently a bit messy. Normally, I would
expect users to work themselves from top to bottom, i.e. they decide to print to
file before typing in the filename and the printer description changes after a
different printer get selected. I therefore suggest to reorganize the dialog to
this order:

Print to: (x) printer ( ) file
Printer name: [__________________v] [Properties...]
Printer description: blablabla
File name: [__________________] [Select file..]

(This is similar to the FireFox print dialog but with the printer description.)

Will send the small patch to do it shortly.

Comment 1

[Peter Weilbacher]

Attachment: The fix

As far as I can see this is the easy fix and it does not have any side effects.

Comment 2

[Roland Mainz]

The patch violates various style guides including the CDE and Windows one. The
attributes are sorted per attribute priorities (printer selected first as it is
the primarly choice on which depend all other decisions in the (sub-)dialogs and
then going on with the other attributes in a left-to-right,top-to-bottom-flow,
sorted per priorities).

And no, please do NOT change that _again_. This was changed few months ago
because people complained about the old design over the last two years. We can't
really make everyone happy but the current design makes at least most of the
people happy and conforms exactly to the CDE style guidelines (the layout is a
clone of the DtPrint dialog (see
http://xprint.mozdev.org/docs/dtprint_fspec.ps)).

Comment 3

[Peter Weilbacher]

Using ancient, not very well designed UI as role model for Mozilla is not the
best thing to do. And AFAICS from bug 235763 (which I think you are referring
to) you just posted the screenshot and the patch and nobody objected before it
was checked in. There was no discussion about the new layout with regard to the
placement of the widgets. But well, I am just somebody with no influence within
Mozilla, so just ignore me...

But as you are quoting the Windows guidelines: their dialog box makes this much
better, see
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/winui/WinUI/WindowsUserInterface/UserInput/CommonDialogBoxLibrary/AboutCommonDialogBoxes/PrintDialogBox.asp>.
(also in relation to bug 263312). They only have one _checkbox_ (not a radio
button) saying "Print to file". That makes it apparent that the settings _above_
also apply when printing to a file!

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 161367 [details] [diff] [review]
The fix

I agree, for accessibility reasons we should have a print to file checkbox
preceding the file name field in the tab order.

Comment 5

[Peter Weilbacher]

This was fixed in bug 263312, so there I can verify wontfix.