5 ms·

so i drew a picture for my daughter and couldn't figure out how to print it, because krita has no print function. between krita and gimp, i know why adobe can c

by modzu 6y ago

so i drew a picture for my daughter and couldn't figure out how to print it, because krita has no print function. between krita and gimp, i know why adobe can charge anything they want for Photoshop. i honestly think its subterfuge

p1necone 6y ago
I vastly prefer Krita to Photoshop for digital art (though I am just a hobbyist), but to each their own. It sounds like maintaining print functionality took significant effort, and they decided it was a better use of man hours to put more time into the core functionality and suggest people use a different application to print their output if they need to do that.
AbuAssar 6y ago
Why not just export as png then let the os print it.
- romwell 6y ago
  Why not use a different software suite altogether? I love the classic response here: - This FOSS is missing a critical feature X - You should do Y instead, and you are incorrect for wanting to use X in the first place! For anyone wondering, literally every other graphics software has a print feature, from MSPaint to (yes) GIMP and Inkscape.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    "Critical feature" but with an "Easy workaround"? Doesn't seem likely.
  - mathgladiator 6y ago
    I think the Unix philosophy which many of us strive to do would have key pieces of software do as few of things as possible, so divesting from print allows other applications to do that better.
  - franga2000 6y ago
    > Why not use a different software suite altogether? If having a print button and a janky pre-print dialog box is worth 200$/year to you then by all means, move your entire workflow to Adobe. Or better yet - put those 200$ on a bug bounty to implement it - I'm sure somebody would jump on it. > I love the classic response here: This is the exact same response as you'd get from Adobe if you requested a feature from them. If a request doesn't carry a direct profit incentive for a company, they will completely ignore it - and if you worked a lot with Adobe software you would be very familiar with that. Yet somehow, people get more mad when small FOSS dev teams don't jump on their pet peeves immediately than when multi-million-dollar companies that they pay hundreds of $ ignore years of pleading by even rather large players in the industry to implement some pretty basic things. It's free software, not free dev time.
jasonjayr 6y ago
They know about this deficiency: https://krita-foundation.tumblr.com/post/621253203762331648/how-to-print-a-drawing-from-krita https://krita-foundation.tumblr.com/post/621253203762331648/... Getting a cross platform UI to work consistency is an impressive challenge to meet. Getting cross platform press-quality print support working reliably, seems like another one of those terribly hard problems.
- romwell 6y ago
  Hope they figure it out! I just installed Krita after getting a 2-in-1 with active pen support, hoping to get into digital painting. I've used GIMP and Inkscape extensively over the years, and used the printing functionality a lot. In fact, whenever I want to print something of exact size, I'd use Inkscape.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Yeah, Krita is amazing but it's really built for digital drawing...
- mappu 6y ago
  However they do use a cross-platform gui toolkit that has built-in printing support (Qt QPrinter) so i do find this a little surprising - I searched for any more information in the issue tracker. The closest I could find was https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378769 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378769 , which might be a concern but not really for desktop printing.
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    Interesting: We actually removed PDF export because there's no good libraries to handle PDF cmyk support. My gut reaction as a programmer was: CMYK? How hard can it be? But then, I am no user of CMYK. All my experience is RGB, and in fact I am bad enough at color to not really notice it when color profiles are significantly off. CMYK is an unknown unknown for me, I don't even understand the troubles they are having. So I think this touches a core problem of open source: The average hobbyist does not feel this itch, hence can't scratch it. You need someone with good understanding of the printing industry, maybe access to professional printing hardware. Hard to do on hobby time or as a lone programmer. This is an example of a whole class of problems where OSS tends to do worse than the industry average. BTW, it pains me to say this as a regular user, krita is very good software.
franga2000 6y ago
I genuinely don't remember the last time I saw someone print something directly from Photoshop. Even professional photo studios I've worked with always save their files (usually to TIFF), open them in a previewer to double-check then and then send them to the printer directly. This isn't one of those "FOSS devs sticking to the UNIX philosophy to a fault, usability be damned" situations. Printing is the kind of thing that is either done so rarely that the literally only two extra clicks aren't going to matter or so frequently that you want to be using a batch workflow anyways. No offense if it just didn't occur to you at the time (I've been there), but "I'll just save the image and print that" is something that I image the vast, vast majority of computer users could figure out in no time and is surely not a significant factor in Adobe's market dominance.

by modzu 6y ago

p1necone 6y ago

I vastly prefer Krita to Photoshop for digital art (though I am just a hobbyist), but to each their own. It sounds like maintaining print functionality took significant effort, and they decided it was a better use of man hours to put more time into the core functionality and suggest people use a different application to print their output if they need to do that.

AbuAssar 6y ago

Why not just export as png then let the os print it.

romwell 6y ago
Why not use a different software suite altogether? I love the classic response here: - This FOSS is missing a critical feature X - You should do Y instead, and you are incorrect for wanting to use X in the first place! For anyone wondering, literally every other graphics software has a print feature, from MSPaint to (yes) GIMP and Inkscape.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  "Critical feature" but with an "Easy workaround"? Doesn't seem likely.
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  I think the Unix philosophy which many of us strive to do would have key pieces of software do as few of things as possible, so divesting from print allows other applications to do that better.
- franga2000 6y ago
  > Why not use a different software suite altogether? If having a print button and a janky pre-print dialog box is worth 200$/year to you then by all means, move your entire workflow to Adobe. Or better yet - put those 200$ on a bug bounty to implement it - I'm sure somebody would jump on it. > I love the classic response here: This is the exact same response as you'd get from Adobe if you requested a feature from them. If a request doesn't carry a direct profit incentive for a company, they will completely ignore it - and if you worked a lot with Adobe software you would be very familiar with that. Yet somehow, people get more mad when small FOSS dev teams don't jump on their pet peeves immediately than when multi-million-dollar companies that they pay hundreds of $ ignore years of pleading by even rather large players in the industry to implement some pretty basic things. It's free software, not free dev time.

jasonjayr 6y ago

They know about this deficiency: https://krita-foundation.tumblr.com/post/621253203762331648/how-to-print-a-drawing-from-krita https://krita-foundation.tumblr.com/post/621253203762331648/... Getting a cross platform UI to work consistency is an impressive challenge to meet. Getting cross platform press-quality print support working reliably, seems like another one of those terribly hard problems.

romwell 6y ago
Hope they figure it out! I just installed Krita after getting a 2-in-1 with active pen support, hoping to get into digital painting. I've used GIMP and Inkscape extensively over the years, and used the printing functionality a lot. In fact, whenever I want to print something of exact size, I'd use Inkscape.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Yeah, Krita is amazing but it's really built for digital drawing...
mappu 6y ago
However they do use a cross-platform gui toolkit that has built-in printing support (Qt QPrinter) so i do find this a little surprising - I searched for any more information in the issue tracker. The closest I could find was https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378769 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378769 , which might be a concern but not really for desktop printing.
- hyperman1 6y ago
  Interesting: We actually removed PDF export because there's no good libraries to handle PDF cmyk support. My gut reaction as a programmer was: CMYK? How hard can it be? But then, I am no user of CMYK. All my experience is RGB, and in fact I am bad enough at color to not really notice it when color profiles are significantly off. CMYK is an unknown unknown for me, I don't even understand the troubles they are having. So I think this touches a core problem of open source: The average hobbyist does not feel this itch, hence can't scratch it. You need someone with good understanding of the printing industry, maybe access to professional printing hardware. Hard to do on hobby time or as a lone programmer. This is an example of a whole class of problems where OSS tends to do worse than the industry average. BTW, it pains me to say this as a regular user, krita is very good software.

franga2000 6y ago

I genuinely don't remember the last time I saw someone print something directly from Photoshop. Even professional photo studios I've worked with always save their files (usually to TIFF), open them in a previewer to double-check then and then send them to the printer directly. This isn't one of those "FOSS devs sticking to the UNIX philosophy to a fault, usability be damned" situations. Printing is the kind of thing that is either done so rarely that the literally only two extra clicks aren't going to matter or so frequently that you want to be using a batch workflow anyways. No offense if it just didn't occur to you at the time (I've been there), but "I'll just save the image and print that" is something that I image the vast, vast majority of computer users could figure out in no time and is surely not a significant factor in Adobe's market dominance.