[cups.general] openoffice.org

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On May 2 16:02 Till Kamppeter wrote (shortened):
> 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.

I am afraid, I don't know who currently does the printing part.
Usually I contact our RPM package maintainers so that they can
collect and bundle the issues and do the upstream communication.


> 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.

Exactly my opinion.


> 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.

Note my ";-)" but nevertheless there is some severity in it.


By the way:

It seems OOo printing output has become at least DSC compliant
because when I print into a file from OpenOffice_org-2.0.4,
the file passes cupstestdsc.

Nevertheless it is still no generic printer-independent PostScript
because it still contains printer specific "Feature" settings:

I have InputSlot LargeCapacity and PageSize Legal as default
in the PPD:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
%%BeginFeature: *InputSlot LargeCapacity
<</DeferredMediaSelection true /MediaPosition 1>> setpagedevice
%%EndFeature
%%BeginFeature: *PageSize A4
<</DeferredMediaSelection true /PageSize [595 842] /ImagingBBox null>>
setpagedevice
%%EndFeature
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The PageSize A4 setting is always the same (almost regardless,
see below) which PageSize setting there is by default in the PPD.

I tested what happens when I remove the A4 choice from the PPD:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
%%BeginFeature: *InputSlot LargeCapacity
<</DeferredMediaSelection true /MediaPosition 1>> setpagedevice
%%EndFeature
%%BeginFeature: *PageSize Legal
<</DeferredMediaSelection true /PageSize [612 1008] /ImagingBBox null>> 
setpagedevice
%%EndFeature
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For the user an unexpected and unpredictable result.
Which normal user is supposed to understand this logic?

For me it seems that the whole OOo printing engine may need
a complete re-write from scratch.
Currently it seems it is a mess of half-broken "solutions"
and workarounds and quick bug fixes.


By the way 2:

The second-most important printable-document-producing application
is perhaps Firefox and guess how good its PostScript is...


I think the basic reason of this kind of problem is that
a voluntary free software programmer may not get much public
recognition and appreciation if he spends a lot of time and
energy to make a really good printing engine for an application
because for normal users "there is no such thing as printing",
i.e. when it works perfectly "to copy the stuff from the screen
onto the paper" it is only what they expect.

Perhaps for users which intentionally use applications which are
really focused on printable-document-producing like Scribus
or LaTeX there exist the task to do printing and therefore
such applications do have good printing engines?


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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