Distributor patches

Don't you like when distributions decide they are going to patch your program so it works worse? And not only it makes your program work worse, you loose your precious time debugging problems that don't really exist.

Ok, i know i blogged about that before, but the problem is still not fixed so i keep whining about it.

KPDF printing and margins

Up to now, KPDF did not let you specify the margins for printing, it always printed with 0 margins, today, seeing that from time to time there's a bug report with people asking about printing PDF with margins i started implementing it, i'm almost done, but have some problems understanding what a user wants when specifying margins.

Let's put a simple example. You have a single page A4 document that has a black rectangle drawn at 2cm of distance from each side. Now you choose to print it with 5cm margin on top. Which result should you get?

a) The printed sheet has the rectangle with these distances: bottom 1.66 cm, top 6.66 cm, left 2cm, right 2cm. That means the available height got reduced from 29,7cm to 24,7cm so distance of 2cm is now 1.66 in the vertical direction, but as available width did not change, you get aspect ratio lost.

b) The printed sheet has the rectangle with these distances: bottom 1.66 cm, top 6.66 cm, left 3.43cm, right 3.43cm. That means the available height got reduced from 29,7cm to 24,7cm so distance of 2cm is now 1.66 in the vertical direction, and to preserve aspect ratio, the available width got reduced from 21 to 17.465 cm, resulting in 1.66 + (21 - 17.465)/2 margin in left and right.

c) Something else

I don't really know what a user would expect when printing, as losing aspect ratio is always a bad idea, but case b) is quite confusing too as you get margins on the horizontal side when you only put it on the vertical side, ideas?

GPG trust paths

Today i found a interesting web that helps you finding GPG trust paths from one key to another, here are the truth paths from me to Amaya Rodrigo, a debian developer i never met, but given that web of trust (6 people with only one hop) i would rather be sure that the key really belongs to her and not to somebody that tries to supplant her.

67% vs 66.7%

In KPDF in the zoom combo we had
50%
66.70%
75%
in okular in the zoom combo we fixed it to
50%
66.7%
75%
but our usability dude still thinks
50%
67%
75%
would be better as it "aligns" things visually. What do you say?

Thanks Zaragoza :-)

Just came back from the KDE meeting at Zaragoza, glad to meet again Antonio, Isaac, Ana and meet for the first time lots of nice people. Thank you guys, the weekend rocked! Thanks also to Warp Networks, DBS and the Zaragoza city council for sponsoring Antonio's and my travels and hotel rooms.