Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[nic2109]

This is all fine and dandy, but I cannot print the PDF once created as epdfview gives a "Segmentation fault" and crashes out.

See forum thread http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=20377.

I'm on 217 with the hpijs drivers package.

It's got me foxed - and BarryK too possibly. Any ideas anyone?

[disciple]

That doesn't seem to be anything to do with CUPS-pdf, but anyway - you might have to try a different pdf reader like Xpdf or something if you need to print while it isn't fixed.

[nic2109]

[disciple]

There are links to three versions at http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=8727
Colonel Panic recommends Adobe Reader 5, but it was very troublesome for me and other people too.

[disciple]

Also, if you install GTKLP, it can print pdf files - but only the whole file - not certain pages.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=1922280903&t=17768

EDIT - it can print a selection of pages from a file - there is a space for extra options on the special tab. I've described some of them at http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Printing.

[disciple]

This is interesting - Opera doesn't seem to like either CUPS, or the PDF writer.

BTW are we likely to see v0.4 sometime, or has something happened to it?

[vovchik]

I can confirm that Opera v. 8.01 and v. 9.10 work properly with CUPS and with the CUPS pdf writer. As I went through a few head-scratching months trying to get CUPS to work with my rather unpopular Xerox Phaser 3120, I have a suspicion that something is misconfigured. In my case, I had mistakenly overwritten two usblp files in /dev with some postscript files during an abortive CUPS configuration session. Once I identified and corrected that problem - and then chose an appropriate driver (not the easiest task) - everything regarding CUPS printing has gone swimmingly ever since.

With kind regards,
vovchik

[disciple]

Hmmm...
It seems like something funny must be going on with Opera (9.10) - I can't get it to print at all now, but other programs print fine.

[jcoder24]

pdf-writer updated to version 0.6. Skipped 0.4 & 0.5 because of the amount of code reorganization done and the number of changes implemented.

New features (via config file)
1) Run in a console-only mode
2) Print job completion notification
3) Customize duration of notification
4) Customize notification type Full (inlcude path) or brief (filename only)

Changes
1) Config file renamed to ~/.pdfwriter.conf (NB hidden file)
2) Set correct permissions on config file
3) Reorganized code to better accommodate console only option
4) On xdialog gtk-warning or gtk-critical errors, exit gracefully but log to /var/log/messages reason and suggest usingconsole only mode
5) Sanity check - remove additional invalid characters in the filename entered by the user
6) Now works on other distros (at least on zenwalk)
7) Changed "Device URI" from pdf-writer:/export/share/pdf/ to pdf-writer:/dev/null since this is not used at all by the pdf-writer backend

Bug Fixes
1) Fixed problem determining home directory for non-root users
2) increased height of some dialog boxes as some text was being hidden depending on theme/wm used
3) Fixed prob when files were printed from stdin. The filename .pdf(....) was used as the default filename

To do
Create gui for managing preferences

~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've attached two files:

The first is the tar.gz cups-pdf backend script "pdf-writer". To test download and install with petget or "tar xvfz -C / pdf-writer.tar.gz"

The second is a WIP manual for cups-pdf/pdf-writer.

Once testing goes ok it will be packaged into a .pet.

[vovchik]

Dear jcoder,

On my machine, every one of your pdf writer incarnations worked fine, including the latest one. I hope you find time to do the preferences part, since I don't know how to get my gs to print out ascii files to pdf using a nice font. They all come out outlooking pretty ugly with a courier type face. I would much prefer dejavu mono. Do you know off hand where I can change the default (e.g. a config file)?

WIth thanks in advance,
vovchik

[disciple]

I don't think it desperately needs to work with spaces in the filename, but fixing that might be almost as easy as this:
If you select a directory with a space in the path, the job gets stuck in the queue and the printer goes offline as before. If you restart the job from CUPS, it gives you the location selection dialogue again, with the space replaced, and if you accept this location you get an error message and it prints it as /Using_the_fallback_C_locale..pdf

[jcoder24]

version 0.7

Changes
1) Changed preferences option USE_X to USE_XWINDOWS
2) Changed separator for preferences file to from space to ":" to accommodate MRUDs with spaces
3) Now prints to folders with spaces in their name
4) Now prints filename with spaces and
5) Added option in ~/.pdfwriter.conf for changing spaces to underscores
6) Some minor code fixes and clean up

Known Issues
Does not work correctly when printing the "Test Page" from the cups printer page. I'm looking into a universal fix for this (ie works on puppy and other distros).

NB
The documentation is to be updated to reflect these changes. BTW suggestions on additions/deletions/clarifications on the documentation is welcomed.

[disciple]

Great!

[disciple]

It mostly seems very good.
If I cancel a print (In 2.16.1), it prints it as "/Created Using the fallback C locale..pdf"

Also I think in the documentation you forgot to update the lpadmin command for /dev/null ?

[jcoder24]

I forgot to mention that you should remove the old preferences file before using the new version.

rm ~/.pdfwriter.conf