mozilla, cups and kprinter: Printing is no fun
Dear all!
Are there any suggestions as to "howto setup printing systemwide" for
firefox, iceweasel, icedove and other gnome applications?
We have nfs-mounted home-directories, use a cups-server for printing,
and most users use kde and kprinter.
We use debian sarge, but I tested the following also with etch, since
etch is close enough to be released.
# aptitude purge firefox
# aptitude install firefox
$ rm -rf .mozilla/
$ firefox
...to set all to default values.
There are several issues:
1. all printers detected by firefox's printing system have paper size
set to 'letter' ignoring
# cat /etc/papersize
a4
Manually editing all the printer settings to a4 is not preserved on
upgrades of firefox.
2. selection of a printer is not remembered. Each time a user prints a
page, the first printer in the list is selected. Ie. if a user prints 5
web pages on printer C, each time printer C has to be selected manually.
3. firefox's print dialog doesn't care about printer options. It is not
possible to select or deselect duplex printing etc.
4. header and footer lines (containing page numbers, urls, etc) are
printed only half or are completely outside the printer's margins.
5. firefox 1.5 default print command,
lpr ${MOZ_PRINTER_NAME: '-P'}${MOZ_PRINTER_NAME}
doesn't work at all at our configuration.
I guess there are some settings in about:config that could be changed,
but this has to be repeated each time there is an upgrade of firefox,
this has to be repeated for icedove, this has to be performed for each
user. I would rather have a system setting for all workstations and all
users.
How do other debianists deal with it? Is there a 'nice' debian solution,
just editing some files in /etc?
Today, a technical assistant considered these (especially 2. and 3.) as
"release critical" for herself and went back to use Windows NT 4.0 again
instead of debian sarge.
For myself, I wouldn't consider M$ software a solution, but I am also
terribly annoyed by not being able to print properly and hassle free
from mozilla applications. (In particular, it's always that extra step
of manually selecting the printer 'default/postscript' and redirecting
it to kprinter.)
Thanks,
Johannes
NB:
On debian etch:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060830
Firefox/1.5.0.7 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.7-2)
xprint xprint-common are not installed. Those, if anything, made matters
worse, the last time I tried it.
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