As most of you are aware (or are you not?), a big chunk of the useful-
ness of kprinter in KDE3 stems from the fact that you could run it as
a standalone app.

As a standalone app, kprinter3 is/was able to load a file via a user-
driven fileopen dialog, or receive a file/job through a pipe/stdin, or
to read a file from disk if given as a commandline parameter.

This made it useful for many to print arbitrary files without opening
an application (used to work for text, images, PS, PDF).

This made it also useful to set kprinter as the printing dialog for
non-KDE applications, such as Ooo, acroread, firefox, thunderbird...
and even many gnome or motif applications that allow for specifying
the print command to be used.

With this feature alone, KDE won over some users from competing OSes
and desktops.


-- 
Kurt Pfeifle
System & Network Printing Consultant ---- Linux/Unix/Windows/Samba/CUPS
Infotec Deutschland GmbH  .....................  Hedelfinger Strasse 58
A RICOH Company  ...........................  D-70327 Stuttgart/Germany