[Scribus] Printing hopeless confusion

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 6 Sep 2007 14:54:03 +0200
Lars Behrens <lars.behrens at pi.uka.de> dijo:

> Am Wednesday 05 September 2007 18:41 schrieb John Jason Jordan:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> First thing, which you should check, as already mentioned: Do you have 
> kprinter? It is a KDE interface to cups which you can use to print from 
> acroread. If you don't have it, install it, if possible.

Yes, I have had kprinter installed for some time. However, I don't know
what you mean by "It is a KDE interface to cups which you can use to
print from acroread." When I go to print from Adobe Reader I get
Reader's print dialog box, not kprinter. As I said before, there is a
drop-down where the printers the user has installed via CUPS are
supposed to appear. In my print dialog box all that box shows is
"custom." To the right of it is a line where I can enter an alternate
print command, and that is where I put an lp or lpr command. If I could
access kprinter from within Reader it would be really cool.

> > 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.
> 
> Kpdf should offer all the options which are available by your driver. Are you 
> sure that the linux printer driver offers customization of the page size (I 
> doubt that)?
> 
> You can check that by pointing a browser to http://localhost:631/printers then 
> choose the printer and then click on "set printer options" (or something 
> similar got the german version here). If possible, set your desired page size 
> here, that should now be the default page size.

Your guess is correct. The web interface does not list Custom as a page
size. That explains why it does not appear in other applications, but
it brings up more confusion. How is it that Scribus lists Custom? Not
that it appears to work properly in Scribus, but at least it is there.
It also does not explain why every application's print dialog displays
a slightly different list of standard paper sizes. 

I have attached a little chart I just made up to show what paper sizes
appear in the print dialog boxes for several different applications.
Note that Scribus is the only one that lists Custom, and also the only
one that lists GermanFanfoldLegal (whatever that is!). I should also
note that OOo Writer, KPDF and the CUPS web interface lists are all
identical. In the attached chart I gave the name as it appears in the
CUPS web interface list. But, while Scribus shows most of the same
list, the names are slightly different, e.g., "#10 Commercial Envelope"
appears as "Env10" in Scribus.

So apparently Scribus is not getting its list of paper sizes from the
driver. Neither is Firefox. Why is that? And where does the list come
from? The driver? The PPD file? The application? The printing gods?

> At linuxprinting.org I cannot find the Xerox 7740.

It's a Phaser 7400DN, not a 7740, but you are correct. The 7400 is not
listed. The letters at the end just refer to which options the printer
came with - "DN" means "duplexer" and "network." So anything with
"Phaser 7400" is the correct item. Listed or not, once I told CUPS
where the PPD file was on my hard drive, it happily installed the
printer.

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