Re: Questions on printing
On Monday 19 August 2002 14:14, Donald R. Spoon wrote:
> Neal Lippman wrote:
> > -SNIP- <
>
> I don't have any pointers towards any documentation... most of my
> knowledge has been gleaned from this mailing list and trial & error.
>
> I have had good luck with getting non-KDE programs to print by just
> pointing the program to "kprinter" in the printer config setup screens.
> I also have installed the cupsys-bsd package and most programs that
> use "lpr" will print correctly without modification. Finally, if I make
> the printer defined in CUPS as the "default" in KDE, then most of the
> non-KDE programs will print correctly.
>
> One "hint" I discovered by accident is to look in the "filters" tab in
> the printer config selection and add any you might need. I had to add
> the PDF (needs Ghostscript) filter to get PDF to print out.
>
> So far, OpenOffice.org, Abiword, Mozilla, Gimp, Acrobat, xpdf, and all
> KDE apps print out correctly for me. Dunno if this will help you or
> not, but this is the best range of printer support I have ever had under
> Linux!
>
> As I said, it took a little 'trial & error" to get to this point... The
> best advise I have is to scan Debian-User and Debian-KDE and look for
> posts on CUPS. If you find something interesting, try it out...
>
Yeah. Getting a unified approach to printing under Linux remains a problem;
it remains harder than it needs to be.
The problem with piping the printing from various apps through kprinter is
that you wind up with two successive dialogs every time you go to print from
apps like Mozilla - the Mozilla provided dialog, followed by kprinter's
dialog. An advantage to piping through kprinter is, however, that you can
select various printers that kde understands, including cups, etc, in that
fashion.
An alternative that I hit upon after reading your email was to just use the
print command "lp" instead of "lpr" as the former sends the print information
to cups while the latter looks for the lpr system. Both (lp and kprinter)
worked fine for me from mozilla - but with lp you don't get the ability to
select a printer.
What's really needed is for all apps to share a common print dialog and/or
library which handles known configured printers. Obviously, kprinter reads
/etc/cups/* and/or /etc/printcap to display known printers, while Mozilla
does not, as far as I can tell, do the same.
nl
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