[cups.general] openoffice.org

[Till Kamppeter]

Does someone here know who at OpenOffice.org is responsible for the 
printing part? Johannes? Ian? Norm? Wendy? I would like to contact 
him/them and invite him/them to the next Printing Summit and/or to the 
Linux Foundation Summit.

We must somehow collaborate with the OpenOffice.org project so that they 
  follow the standards so that printing "just works".

Did someone of you report bugs upstream to the OpenOffice.org project? 
Did you get answers? Can you post links?

OpenOffice.org is the most important printable-document-producing 
application and therefore it is VERY important that it prints reliably 
and that its dialog exposes all available options. And it is not the 
role of CUPS or contributers like Helge to make workarounds. It should 
be fixed at the origin.

Note also if we add blocker rules to the /etc/cups/*.types files we will 
only get more bug reports from users and distro maintainers will simply 
patch away these rules.

    Till


Helge Blischke wrote:
> 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
> 
>