On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 08:31:15AM -0500, Alan Shutko wrote:
>Magnus Therning <magnus@therning.org> writes:
>
>> I can't say I am very happy with the printing support in Firefox. It
>> does find CUPS and XPrint printers (or maybe it's XPrint that finds the
>> CUPS printers), but what I'd really like is to print two pages on each
>> side (ala 'a2ps -2'). Anyone who knows how I can achieve that?
>
>Cups can do that by itself, if you pass -o number-up=2 to lp. I'm not
>sure how to do that within firefox, though, since I don't use firefox
>on Linux. Installing a tool like gpr might be helpful to make
>selecting print options sane for all programs.
Didn't know that, a2ps also has worked all the time and has some other
bells and whistles that I use.
I haven't checked gpr, but I did have gtklp installed for something like
5 minutes. It didn't manage to tell the printer to do what I wanted
(number-up=2 thing) so it had to go.
>A bit of google looks like you can change the command used to print in
>Print->Properties. So you might look there.
Well, the thing is that I can't :-( The only printers that show up in
FireFox are the ones from XPrint, and I reckon printing on them isn't
done via a command line tool because there is no command line to modify.
Once upon a time I had a "PostScript/default" printer in my
FireFox that did use a command line tool (lpr by default, I changed it
to use a2ps). It doesn't show any more in FireFox (despite still being
present in my prefs.js) so I can't modify that one either. Even if it
were there chances are I still would be irritated every time I print
since I don't know how to tell FireFox what printer should be the
default one.
>> 3. Configure XPrint. (This piece of software is a mystery to me. Looked
>> for info but found very little in the way of configuration
>> information.)
>
>Using XPrint is the problem, not the solution. It makes configuration
>of simple cases vastly more complex than they need to be, completely
>refuses to interoperate intelligently with anything smarter than BSD
>lpd forcing you to configure things in multiple places, and in the
>default configuration actually reduces print quality. With enough
>work you can make XPrint work, but with enough you can also dig holes
>with an ethernet card. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
That's it's a beast to configure I've noticed (making a certain printer
default and printing duplex was awkward to say the least). However, my
experience is that it interfaces well with CUPS (automatically finds all
CUPS printers, if you only want a few to be visible you are in for a
"configuration treat") and print quality is good.
/M
--
Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus@therning.org
http://magnus.therning.org/
"Sendmail" and "make" are two well known programs that are pretty widely
regarded as being debugged into existence. That's why their command
languages are so poorly thought out and difficult to learn. It's not
just you -- everyone finds them troublesome.
-- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, p. 220
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