[cups.bugs] [MOD] STR #4120: CUPS has bannertops and cups-filters has bannertopdf for PDF workflow

[Till Kamppeter]

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[STR New]

Following STR #3930, CUPS 1.6.x on non-Mac operating systems will be always
used together with the cups-filters package.

As the cups-filters package is designed to always do PDF-based printing
(input data PDF, if not, ...topdf filter -> pdftopdf ->
pdftoraster/rasterto..., pdfto..., ... -> printer), it would be awkward to
have a bannertops filter for banners and test pages in this workflow.
Therefore Lars Uebernickel has contributed a bannertopdf filter to
cups-filters which is supposed to be used when cups-filters is used.

To make higher-quality and more customizable test pages and banners the
new bannertopdf does not take bitmap images any more for getting graphics
into the test page and the banners but instead, it takes PDF templates.
This allows freely scalable vector graphics which can easily be created
with any program with "Export to PDF" functionality.

Unfortunately this makes the following files incompatible with the ones
which come with CUPS:

/usr/share/cups/data/testprint
/usr/share/cups/banners/unclassified
/usr/share/cups/banners/topsecret
/usr/share/cups/banners/standard
/usr/share/cups/banners/secret
/usr/share/cups/banners/confidential
/usr/share/cups/banners/classified

So to install cups-filters together with CUPS one would need to remove
these files (and /usr/lib/cups/filter/bannertops) from CUPS to avoid
conflicts and misbehavior of bannertopdf.

As Mac OS X also does not use bannertops AFAIK I suggest that bannertops
and listed files get either removed from CUPS or optional via an option
for ./configure. Otherwise all Linux distributions will have to do the
awkward step of removing the mentioned files from CUPS.

Link: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L4120
Version: 1.6-current