Wary/Racy printing fix

October 27, 2011 — BarryK

Wary 5.2 users have reported that printing works from some applications, not from others.

The one guy who knows all about printing is forum member rcrsn51, and awhile back he advised me that the file /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops is missing in Wary.

Fine, except that the cups compiled in T2 does not have that file. I checked, no previous compile of cups in T2 has it either. However, the file does exist in the Poppler package -- and there is a comment in the Poppler docs that their utilities may work better than those of the same name in the cups package (at least, that is the comment I remember). So, I applied my own reasoning, created a symlink from /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops to the Poppler file at /usr/bin/pdftops.

When I tested printing prior to releasing Wary 5.2, it worked. However, I just happened to only test printing from ePDFView and maybe one other app that does work. It turns out that printing from Abiword and many other apps is broken.

So, I was left puzzled. This is where rcrsn51 has come to the rescue, and we are indebted to his knowledge and helpfulness. Here is his response and fix:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=72258&start=120

Just install the 'cups_pdftops_filter-1.3.11.pet' that rcrsn51 has posted.

This leaves me wondering what went wrong in T2. Perhaps there is a pre-compile configure option missing.

Comments

Also Racy

Might be a change in CUPS
Username: vtdiy
"That didn't fix i for me in Racy 53 and Libre Office, had problems with being unable to print landscape mode. After researching, looks like a CUPS problem -- bmaybe an intentional change, see: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L4078 Also I was finally able to cure the Libre office problem by changing its default Printer Properties -- Device-- Printer Language Type from PDF to Postscript Level 2.

Need CUPS 1.4
Username: vtdiy
"CUPS needs to be upgraded to 1.4 to get rid of the xpdf filter landscape printing issue according to CUPS own bug reporting site. http://www.cups.org/str.php?L2881+Qversion:1.3

Tags: wary