570227 - Printing tasks: Save space by rearranging task properties into a table, add missing properties to printout

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: Printing, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Followup from bug 325137, comment 65 (2010-03-30, by ThomasD)

Eduardo, thanks for the patience and diligence with which you have been working on this bug. That's a great improvement!

Looking at the current preview (screenshot attachment 435810 [details]), some thoughts:
1) We could save a lot of space (i.e. printout length, paper, and trees...)
with a small re-arrangement of the properties. We currently have:

/When/
  When-property
/Location/
  Location-property
/Description/
  Description-property

Re-arranging this into a tabular structure will produce a much more compact
printout in many cases, especially when we add more properties as suggested by
Philipp's comment 54:

/When:/        When-property
/Location:/    Location-property
/Category:/    Category-property
/Status:/      Status-properties (inkl. % completed)
/Repeat:/      Repeat-property
/Description:/ Description-property

Eduardo, would this be a difficult change? Of course, we should only print
properties whose value has been set/changed by user, so e.g. if category is
"none", just skip the category-property altogether, as you already do for the
when-property.

Benefit of tabular structure: For most cases (with short property-values),
we're saving one printed line per property. That's saving up to 6 lines or more
per task if all properties are defined. For a lot of cases (property-values of
up to ca. 1.6 lines), we're not loosing printed space compared to the current
layout. For a few cases (property-values of more than 1.6 lines), we loose a
small percentage of space compared to the current layout (e.g. for every 5
lines property-length, we loose one line because of the tabular structure).

Philipp, do you think that we should print Calendar-property and
Reminder-property as well? I'm not sure. In the long run, we'll need a way of
customizing which properties should be printed or not. But that's surely beyond
the scope of this bug. I'd propose to skip Calendar and Reminder for printout
until such time that we'll have customizable printout. Otherwise, some people
might go mad that we print a full line per task for Calendar-property where
they might only have one calendar, or be printing just one calendar out of
many.