[Bug 905147] [NEW] QPrinterDialog ignores default settings from CUPS

[luxifer]

Public bug reported:

KDE as well as many QT-Applications use QPrinterDialog as their printing
dialog. Thing is: This dialog ignores default settings defined in CUPS -
it doesn't even remember that last settings that were chosen. I know
this is a QT issue but I kindly ask you not to close this bug as
upstream and here's why:

1. This bug has been around for years now - the first report to Nokia about was back in 2008 if I recall correctly. 
2. A user doesn't know and doesn't care about whose fault it is. He just knows, that he set his printer settings to default to duplex in CUPS and that his QT applications don't print duplex. At first he might shrug and set duplex in the dialog. Next time the setting is back to simplex. The same is true for other options like collate and color settings. It's just a huge usability issue. 
3. The fix below has been adopted by other major distributions for quite some time now. It works for duplex, collate and color settings. 
4. It saves lots and lots of trees!

I think it does not work for paper size and in general it doesn't fix
the problem that QT can't remember the settings you choose in the print
dialog. The paper size may be read from the configured defaults easily,
too, but settings saving may be a bit harder. However, you'd implement
this fix, you'd do something VERY good for Ubuntu - especially since
12.04 is meant to be an LTS release! If you could even improve the fix
that would be huge!

Here's the fix from the KDE bug tracker:
https://bugs.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=41187

More info:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=180051
https://bugreports.qt.nokia.com//browse/QTBUG-6471 (and https://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-23037) and other bug reports from the comments there.

For Oneiric I've made a patched version in a PPA of mine that you could
look at. You'll see it's really a minor modification that doesn't take
any effort at all to implement. You can find it here:
https://launchpad.net/~dhertel/+archive/myfixes

As a side note: I know that KDE is not the default environment in
Ubuntu, but it's getting more important for people since Gnome2
officially is no more and Unity isn't exactly better when one doesn't
even like Gnome3 to begin with.

So I hope this makes it into Precise...

Cheers,
Dominik

** Affects: qt
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

** Affects: qt4-x11 (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: printing qt usability

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/905147

Title:
  QPrinterDialog ignores default settings from CUPS

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