KDE Developers may have noticed that the developer documentation server at api.kde.org is down. This is due to a hardware failure which will be recovered next week. That need not put the brakes on your work though, since if you have the source code on your system you can build the API docu locally yourself, as HTML, as man pages, or as Qt Assistant help files to view in Qt Assistant or Qt Creator.

Read all about it on techbase: http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tools/apidox

Since some years, I have searched for an elegant solution to generate call graphs out of C++ source code. Today I found it. It is doxygen. I have evaluated doxygen years ago, but I threw it away. The reason is that you have to know two things about doxygen:

• Do not call doxygen, start with doxywizard and everything goes straightforward.

I'm real sorry, but the images in this blog post were lost in a server move (kdedevelopers cannot host images), so I had to delete it altogether =(

I'm real sorry, but the images in this blog post were lost in a server move (kdedevelopers cannot host images), so I had to delete it altogether =(

This is possibly one of the most widely used and most simple method to adjust an image. It's so simple and effective that you will want to use it on all your pictures from now on, so keep an eye on this, and have fun.

Photography has changed a lot since digital cameras broke into our lives and replaced film cameras. Camera makers have made great efforts to convince us that digital is better, and that new digital cameras are worth their money.

We now have documentation for our custom KDE CMake Modules, brought to you by the EBN. I have a little script that runs every night to re-generate this page, just in case we changes things as time goes by.

But, if you're like me, you'd rather have quick access to a man page. You can create one with the following command:

% cmake -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH=/path/to/kdesvn/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/cmake/modules --help-custom-modules /path/to/kdeinstall/share/man/man1/kdecmake.1


Too many KDE folks refuse to use http://techbase.kde.org/ because it breaks blocks of code.

You can however make it usable. A hint just for you:

What a coincidence today happened. In the morning I used KDEPrint's 'poster' frontend to create a "poor man's poster" in A1 size from 4 A3 printouts.

In the afternoon, a lady mailed me, asking why her KDE print dialog on Solaris didn't show the poster dialog, while her husband's openSUSE KDE did show it.

I took the time, mailed her back what I knew about the question, and included a few screenshots.

Two hours later I thought for myself: "WTF -- you took more than half an hour to write back to this lady and explain everything to her... Why not put another 30 minutes effort into it and convert the mail into a little tutorial to be published in my blog?".

I slightly changed my earlier mail in a few sentences, re-arranged it a bit, and posted a screenshot with a long comment to kdedevelopers.org.

Hardly I was ready with this when I saw a posting by Hin-Tak on the 'printing summit' mailing list over at linux-foundation.com, asking about ... poster again (without remembering the name of the utilitiy). Happily I mailed the link to said image with comments back to him.

And now it's "Heck! I may as well make a real blog post from it, add a few more screenshots and declare it a tutorial...."

So here we go.

You [image:3042 align="left" width=408 height=444 hspace=6 vspace=4 border=0 class="showonplanet"] may already have come across the "Poster" tab in KDE's printing dialog. The one the screenshot to the left shows. It should be there for each printer you select from the drop-down list, even the virtual ones, that "Print to File" or "Send to Fax" or "Mail PDF File".
However, the poster tab of kprinter will *NOT* show up if you don't have the "poster" utility installed and in your $PATH. So if you want it, simply install the 'poster' package.

(UPDATE: Seems after Michael Goffioul's patches from 2002 there were more new features added to poster (which I wasn't aware of). There's a bug report 132916 which was pointed out to me in a comment below by jlp. Given that the bug reporter says "version 20060221 doesn't work, while version 20050907 does", it is probably saver to download and use the latter. BTW, openSUSE ships the version 20020826 which works as well. This bug may explain why Gentoo and Debian have reverted to a 1999 version of poster, which does not work with KDEPrint.)

Obtain "poster" from here: ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/printing/.

Important: you need to use the version from the link above, should your distro's version not function properly! It contains some patches to make it work with KDEPrint (poster's commandline abilities don't suffer from these patches!). The patches (written by our deerly missed Michael Goffioul, who currently does have too little time for active KDEPrint development) have also been accepted by the upstream poster developer, years ago.

Unfortunately, some recent distro releases (Debian?, *buntu?) for some reason seem to ship an older version which makes the kprinter poster tab display an error message.

As soon as you install the patched version (compiling it is easy), kprinter will start work with it.

If you figure your distro is using a b0rken version (or no poster package at all), you should contact its respective packager and/or submit a bug report or feature request. Ask them to use the patched version of poster to make it work with KDEPrint.