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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: One-click-printing
From:       Magnus Ihse <d95-mih () nada ! kth ! se>
Date:       2000-01-28 17:49:20
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On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Casey Allen Shobe wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > > one thing I like about M$ office is that the printing options 
> > > dialog only pops up if one selects File|Print from the menu or 
> > > with Ctrl-P, but the job is immediately sent with the default 
> > > settings when the toolbar icon is clicked. 

And I consider it one of the worst UI glitches in MS Office. :-)
There is no chance of knowing that a click on the button will not do
the same as the menu option, when they have done all they possibly
can to reinforce the impression that the print button will do the
same thing as the menu: put the same icon on the button as in front
of the menu item, put it after the open and save buttons (which does
the same as the corresponding menu items) and have a tooltip
identical to the menu text (except for the "..." which one hardly
notice it's missing) 

Don't know how many times I've been swearing over this when I wanted
to print only the first page of a 100 pages long document, and find
that Word prints it all without asking me...

> Indeed.  Maybe the default toolbar icon should be 'Print', which could be
> changed to 'Print...' - dunno if this would be too much of a change or not.

The "..." is not enough to distinguish. Since "Print" normally is
followed by "..." (and a dialog), the quick print option should be
more explicitly marked, such as "Print immediately". And it should
have a different icon from "Print", so you can see what the button in
the toolbar does without trying it.

But with these usability issues fixed, I could very well agree that
"Print immediately" is a good thing.

/Magnus

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