[cups.general] Re: cups does not suck...

[Wolfgang Wegner]

Hi,

well, I cannot say cups sucks...

First, it really solved one every-day printing problem for me:
I can now finally print on my Lexmark 4039 in duplex using
ghostscript. (That printer's postscript is _really_ slow and
ghostscript is of better quality)

But there definitely are some things I do not like:
- It is not really easy to understand which way a job file takes
  until it finally arrives at the printer (even with a rather high
  log level)
- I am missing the LPRng style progress information in lpq
  (I know it is not accurate, but wuite usable)
- I did not yet further investigate it, but it seems to me that
  CUPS changes the border on its own when doing duplex printing
  (at least when using ghostscript)
- CUPS (as well as LPRng) very often crashes my old CLJ4500
  during the first print job after the printer powers up
  (printer prints only blank sheets endlessly, even after
  cancelling the job and sending another one - only power
  cycle helps). So i still have to use netcat to print to
  this printer...
- A parallel-connected LJ2100 at work sometimes hangs during
  processing a job, and CUPS does not recognize it. The same
  printer sometimes misses the job header, thus printing PCL
  as ASCII... :-(

The many automatic features of CUPS may come handy, but I really
insist on having the option to turn them off, because I am used
to have my documents ready formatted before printing them.

While LPRng may be a bit more difficult to configure, I personally
find it better documented and more robust.
("Jehova, Jehova!" ;-) )

Regards,
Wolfgang