GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 210346
Print Preview shows empty page when preview pane is closed
Last modified: 2013-09-10 13:59:13 UTC
Description of Problem: The "Print Preview" window displays an empty, blank page if selected in a mail folder view whose preview pane is closed. Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. Open a view of any mail folder. 2. Use View -> Preview Pane to turn off the preview pane. 3. Click once on any mail message to select it. 3. Select File -> Print Preview. Actual Results: Print Preview window shows a completely empty, blank page. Expected Results: Print Preview window should show a page containing a printable rendering of the selected message. How often does this happen? Consistently repeatable. Additional Information: This might affect printing too; I haven't tried that.
Note that bug 200215 has recently been reopened. The issue there is similar to that reported here, though not quite a duplicate. Anyone attempting to fix this bug should at least be aware of bug 200215 as well.
Probably 1.0, though I can be talked out of that.
this is no longer even possible unless you have the preview open it seems.
It's still possible in the 0.15.99 [+cvs.2001.10.04.04.08.08] snapshot. Try the following steps: 1. Open the preview pane. 2. Single-click on a message, so that it appears in the preview pane. 3. Close the preview pane. 4. File -> Print Preview will be enabled; select it. 5. Observe empty page in Print Preview window.
Ok, now these buttons/menus are disabled properly in all the cases i could think of to test. Since we need to use the gtkhtml (which is basically turned off when you have the message display off) for printing, printing cannot be enabled when its hidden.
We're treating the symptoms but not the disease. The original bug can still be revealed as follows: 1. Turn off the preview pane. 2. Right-mouse click on any message. 3. Select "Print" from the pop-up context menu. 4. Click on the "Preview" button in the "Print Message" dialog. Presumably someone will try to fix this by disabling "Print" in the context menu when the preview pane is closed. But that's absurd: if one can copy, forward, save, etc. why shouldn't one be able to print? There is no rational explanation for that in end-user terms; it's purely an artifact of internal implementation decisions. The user has every reason to expect printing to work without showing the preview pane. If printing is deeply entangled with the physical visibility of a gtkhtml widget showing the message, then that strikes me as a pretty deep architectural flaw which should be fixed rather than hacked around. When this bug is fixed properly, Print and Print Preview should work and work *correctly* regardless of whether the preview pane is on or off.
no, you're just not understanding the issues... the whole point of toggling the preview off is so that messages remain unloaded until you clickety-click on them in the message-list. this is the behavior people wanted, so you're stuck with it. Yay user logic!
In the interest of making progress, I'm willing to consider availability of printing without the preview pane as a distinct issue to be debated elsewhere. For this bug, let's restrict our view to the specific matter of a blank print preview. And that can still be produced as given above: 1. Turn off the preview pane. 2. Right-mouse click on any message. 3. Select "Print" from the pop-up context menu. 4. Click on the "Preview" button in the "Print Message" dialog.
not anymore ya can't
> If printing is deeply entangled with the physical visibility of a > gtkhtml widget showing the message, then that strikes me as a pretty > deep architectural flaw which should be fixed rather than hacked > around. Yes, it is so entangled, and yes, that is a flaw. But it's not something that can be fixed in time for 1.0, so it's a choice between buggy behavior or simple kludges.
A question for mail-maint: have you guys filed another 'fix the architechture' bug for 1.1/1.2, in lieu of leaving this bug open?
Yup. It's at the end of bug 200082.