[cups.general] openoffice.org

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Apr 27 22:17 Till Kamppeter wrote (shortened):
> The first will easily work around the problem that the OOo folks do not 
> care about generating correct PostScript for many releases already.

Unfortunately this is true :-(

But why should we care when they insist not to care?

I suggest to try to autodetect non-correct PostScript
(e.g. via cupstestdsc if first line is '%!PS-Adobe-3.0')
and reject it with an "Unsupported format" error.

Whatever kind of workaround we may implement, it will never ever
work really well because any workaround has some (unexpected)
drawbacks and then we are blamed when our workarounds do not
work perfectly in any case, see for example
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=80448#c20
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=80448#c21

When we implement workarounds for broken PostScript from certain
applications, the application programmers may think that their
broken PostScript is correct because "it prints" (at least
for their tests on their hardware but see 1. above) and then
it may never ever be fixed in the application.

When we implement workarounds for broken PostScript from certain
applications, the users may think that the printing system is
responsible to accept and adjust whatever PostScript input
and again we are blamed when it does not print perfectly
for whatever kind of broken input.


By the way 1:

OpenOffice PostScript can be detected via its
%%Creator: OpenOffice.org <version>
line, for example:
%%Creator: OpenOffice.org 2.0-pre
%%Creator: OpenOffice.org 2.0
It is very easy to handle this kind of input:
Add a matching application/openoffice-ps MIME type
without a filtering rule so that it becomes rejected with
"Unsupported format 'application/openoffice-ps'"
in any case because it is broken in any case ;-)


By the way 2:

It seems OpenOffice ignores PPD options in JCLOpenUI/JCLCloseUI
sections (i.e. it shows only PPD options in OpenUI/CloseUI)
but I am a bit tired about useless bug reporting regarding
printing with OpenOffice...


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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