[cups.general] Print dialog boxes in applications (Linux)

[Till Kamppeter]

What apps should do is polling the list of paper sizes (and also other 
user-settable options) from CUPS (and CUPS takes them from the 
printer's/the driver's PPD file). OpenOffice.org and all KDE apps poll 
the options from CUPS, also newer GNOME/GTK apps (based on new printing 
APIU of GTK 2.10.x or newer), therefore the results of OOo Writer and 
KPDF are the same as of CUPS.

Old GNOME/GTK apps and also Thunderbird and Firefox do not have common 
printing dialogs and do not poll options from CUPS. They offer a 
hard-coded selection of paper sizes.

AFAIR Scribus also gets options from CUPS, but it seems to always add a 
custom page size choice. Why it adds FanfoldGermanLegal or why it uses 
other page size names than the PPD I do not know.

Work on a common dialog for all apps and desktops is under way:

http://www.mmiworks.net/eng/publications/labels/openPrinting.html

But it will take time until this gets implemented.

    Till


John Jason Jordan wrote:
> I have numerous laser printers installed on my Ubuntu Feisty amd64
> computers. My most recent acquisition is a Xerox Phaser 7400DN, and it
> is also the source of problems.
> 
> One thing that would help in figuring things out is if I could
> understand how applications get the options to display in their print
> dialog boxes. In the case of the 7400DN, the specific problem is media
> sizes. I have attached a small PDF showing a chart I made for which
> paper sizes are displayed in the print dialog boxes for various
> applications when printing to the 7400DN. The first one, "CUPS," is
> what is listed in the printer options in the CUPS web interface. But
> note that Firefox displays only a small number of the total. Scribus,
> on the other hand, displays two additional ones, GermanFanfoldLegal and
> Custom. And in Scribus the names are somewhat different, e.g., "#10
> Commercial Envelope" appears as "#10Env." 
> 
> So where do applications get the list of options for a printer? Why are
> they different from one application to the next?
> 
> 
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