[cups.general] openoffice.org

[Helge Blischke]

Johannes Meixner wrote:
> 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

 From a technical point of view, I agree. But is such
a "denial of service" policy really a solution for
people who NEED to print from OOo?

Helge


-- 
Helge Blischke
Softwareentwicklung

H.Blischke at acm.org