Addition : Ink Level

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 08:32 -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 12:54:08 +0000, Tim Waugh <twaugh at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Perhaps this is an area that eggcups could expand into -- or should it
> > be in the tool for setting up print queues instead?
> 
> how about both :->
> 
> eggcups by its very nature.. if its working correctly.. isn't always
> exposed to the user's interface, it hides itself if there is nothing
> to report. If someone wants to check ink level and eggcups is the only
> place where you can get to that ui for the ink level how to you force
> eggcups icon to appear so you can interact with it?

When do you want to know if a printer is running out of ink?  I think
the answer is: when you want to print to it, or if one of your jobs is
printing or queued to be printing on that printer.  If you're not
printing, then unless you're the person maintaining the printers, you
don't care.

So there's two separate places ink level notification should be placed,
for the two different cases above.  For initial printing, ink status
should go into the print dialog, just like we display the number of
outstanding jobs.  We could simply append "(low ink)" to the printer
name, or have a separate column.

Secondly, when you have print jobs active, eggcups should be monitoring
the printers relevant to you.  If one of those printers is running low
on ink, then we want a notification bubble, so you can notify the
sysadmin, or cancel your job and redirect it, or both.

I don't have any immediate thoughts on a UI for the person *maintaining*
the printers.  Seems like that could just be a cron job or something
that sends email.