[Scribus] Printing hopeless confusion

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007 09:17:50 +0200
Pierre Marchand <capparis at free.fr> dijo:

> On Wednesday 05 September 2007 03:15:20 John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > [snip]
> 
> You might do as most users do, produce PDF files with Scribus & print these 
> files with a dedicated app., say Acrobat (reader or not).

That was the first thing I tried.

1) Adobe Reader on Ubuntu amd64 does not list the printers you have
installed via CUPS. The only way to print is with lp or lpr, which
cannot access the features of the printer. That is because lp and lpr
are just too old. The reason CUPS printers do not appear in the
drop-down list in Adobe Reader is because Reader finds the list of
printers via certain 32-bit libraries, libraries which Ubuntu decided
not to install in the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. No 32-bit application
has a drop-down list of printers installed in CUPS. I am hoping this
will be fixed in Reader 8.1 for Linux, whose release should be pretty
soon (the beta has been closed for a month). I know it will be
available via rpm and deb, and I am praying that it will also be
available in 64-bit versions. I put in a strong word about 64-bit Linux
with several of the Adobe development team.

2) KPDF (as I stated earlier) does not list Custom as a possible page
size, so I can print only to its list of paper sizes, none of which is
9 by 12 inches. It is a mystery to me why different applications
implement their print dialog boxes with varying options, even though
all are printing via CUPS.

3) Cabaret has a different missing element in its print dialog box -
you cannot specify landscape or portrait. Furthermore, the ISBN barcode
(generated by Scribus) fails to print, also a border around a graphic
fails to print. Both appear fine on screen and print fine from Scribus
and Adobe Reader and KPDF. Cabaret is also flaky - crashes a lot.

4) There are no other PDF viewers that I know of that have decent
printing capabilities. Having said that, the Phaser 7400 has the new
Adobe PDF print engine, so I can send a PDF to it directly.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, the only way to do so from Linux is
with lp or lpr, and that takes me back to the fact that lp and lpr
cannot access the features of the printer due to lack of syntax.
Perhaps there is a way to embed the print options in the PDF file, but
I don't know how to do that.