[kde-linux] CUPS help PLEASE!

[James Tyrer]

On 07/17/2013 04:57 PM, Duncan wrote:
> James Tyrer posted on Wed, 17 Jul 2013 07:25:20 -0700 as excerpted:
>
>> It appears that the 1.6.x releases of CUPS print worse on my line
>> printer.
>
> This is simply background information as I haven't had a printer in
> several years, but I've been reading about it in my various FLOSS-related
> news feeds.  In case you didn't know, Apple, who bought out the folks
> formerly sponsoring cups and its developers, has *SERIOUSLY* (and
> extremely controversially) changed it recently (for 1.6 IIRC), basically
> ignoring the Linux use case and dropping the former support for it,
> resulting in huge problems on the Linux side.
>
Yes, now LFS/BLFS had gotten it to work.  The problem is that the RIP 
doesn't work correctly.

> A project to take up the slack and continue maintenance and development
> of the filters and other cups infrastructure for the Linux side was
> established and is now sponsored by the Linux Foundation which should
> take care of the problem going forward, but the transition hasn't been
> exactly smooth, to put it mildly.
>
I can only hope that they would fork it and fix what I believe are 
serious design errors.

It needs to use an unmodified PPD files to describe the printer.  There 
should be a GUI program to edit and generate PPD files.

It needs to have separate configuration files for each printer to choose 
the RIP that is used.  The configuration files should be edited by the 
GUI interface.

If Ghostscript is chosen for the RIP, that should mean that the 
Ghostscript "drivers" could be used to print with or to generate files.

The idea of using a universal RIP and then converting the raster image 
that it generates to match a printer is simply NOT a good idea.  It 
should be scraped.

There should be a CUPS lite subset for people that only want to use 
printers directly connected to their computer.

> So either expect and be prepared to deal with and work around hopefully
> temporary printing issues such as yours until everything settles down, or
> if possible, consider staying with older working cups for another year or
> so, /then/ upgrade, after everything has hopefully settled down and works
> once again.
>
I guess that the only possibility is to see if I can get Foomatic to 
work.  I think that I can setup direct printing with OpenOffice, but 
Qt/KDE will only print with CUPS -- very bad idea.  Not having a simple 
print spooler for PS application output as part of KDE is also a poor 
choice.

-- 
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch