Re: Windows and Printing Systems

[Kent West]

Pigeon wrote:

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 04:56:32AM -0600, Kent West wrote:
 

Marius Amado Alves wrote:
   

* Printing/CUPS *
I managed to install cupsys via apt-get and added a printer with the web
interface, but this printer does not show up in the print dialog of the
applications. It's an HP DeskJet on the parallell port. What am I 
missing?
     

[Rant]
I'd love to help you, but printing on Linux is _still_ a black art. I've 
been using Debian exclusively on my boxes for about four years now, and 
I generally just avoid printing if I can. Of course everyone's going to 
come back on this comment and say "Use CUPS! It's ultra easy!" or "You 
did replace the obsolete lpr with lprng, right?" and such, but then you 
still have to tell Mozilla to print to "qtcups" or to "lpr -PmyPrinter 
--use-secret-incantation" and configure OpenOffice.org (somehow . . .) 
and, and, and, and it's just black magic as far as I can tell. And I'm 
not a stupid person. So the short answer is, "Good luck!"
[/End_of_Rant]
   

I install cupsys-bsd, and in the "Print Command" dialog box of any
application I'm printing from I enter "lp". I haven't used
OpenOffice.org, but this works for everything else I've tried,
including mozilla.
 

The one machine I tried this on did not work that way (I finally 
resorted to using qtcups as the command, which works fine). Of course, I 
was printing to a color network printer via IP. And that's my point. 
Sure cups works, here, here, and here. But once you start throwing in 
the exceptions, a winprinter here, a network printer there, a usb 
printer over yon, it seems that there's no canonical solution. I've had 
enough success to know that most problems can be overcome, but I can't 
answer the original poster's questions, because there's never a 
consistent pattern that works for me.

Don't take this as whining; I'm just saying that my perception of 
printing in Linux is that it's still a black art, and I'm not wizard 
enough to solve the problem remotely (whereas if I were sitting at his 
machine I could probably eventually beat it into submission).

--
Kent
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