kcmshell printer: Copy to / psuedo printer? (print preview)

[Cristian Tibirna]

On 22 March 2007 20:07, Ken Tanzer wrote:
> I set up a pseudo-printer that calls kghostview, which works fine if you
> print via kprinter.  For the jobs coming from other machines, I looked
> at using the kcmshell printer module.  This is a great program, and
> almost does what I want.  It's got a "move job" option, but this only
> provides options for real printers, not the psuedo-printers.  

Because pseudo-printers are what the name says: not really printers. They 
aren't managed by the printing system, thus they are not queued. They are 
simple (or not so simple) scripts and programs that take the output of your 
program from kdeprint and do something to it instantly.

This is why you can't "stop" a pseudo-printer either.

> Also, for 
> this to work we'd need to be able to "copy" instead of "move" the job.
>
> Does anyone know of another way to do this?  Alternatively, does anyone
> have a sense of how much work would be involved in adding this feature,
> or have some pointers about how to go about it?

I wasn't able to trace all that KDEPrint does with the "move" command 
(kdeprint is a rather complex piece of technology with which I'm far from 
completely familiar, given that I didn't write it). But I guess the "move" 
command just acts on the printing backend (in your case CUPS -- and perhaps 
it only works with CUPS).

I think you would need hooks into CUPS in order to get viewing access to the 
jobs spooled on the server.

There was a bit of discussion about this a year ago at the Printing Summit, 
with the author of CUPS, but I don't know what is the status of the matter 
now. You might want to write to the user mailinglists of the CUPS project.

Sorry for not being very helpful. Thanks for your understanding.

-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org