[cups.general] running OOo 2.2 as a CUPS filter

[Helge Blischke]

Johannes Meixner wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Sep 8 08:10 Helge Blischke wrote (shortened):
> 
>>In order to automate bulk printing of office documents
>>I managed to run OOo 2.2 (via a small wrapper written in Perl)
>>as a filter in CUPS.
>>
>>OOo is called from within the wrapper as
>>   soffice -headless -display :n name_of_document
>>It may occur that the ordinary X display does not
>>work under lp as user due to authentification problems.
>>In that case it works with connecting to a display
>>provided by the Xvfb fake server.
>>
>>Now to the problem:
>>Though it usually requires some initial hacks to
>>get OOo properly initialized for user lp, it works
>>with most Linux distributions, but *not* on a
>>SUSe 8.2 system
> 
> 
> I don't have such a system running here and therefore I cannot
> reporoduce anything here at the moment.
> 
> Perhaps you can provide more detailed (error)-mesages?
> E.g. the relevant part of CUPS' error_log in debug mode
> while your filter is executed or do a "su - lp" and then
> run only your OOo command to get OOo's (error)-mesages.
> 
> 
> Kind Regards
> Johannes Meixner

The CUPS error_log shows:
---snip---
I [07/Sep/2007:18:49:58 +0200] Job 19 queued on 'local-print-to-file' by 'technik'.
I [07/Sep/2007:18:49:58 +0200] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/officetops (PID 5167) for job 19.
I [07/Sep/2007:18:49:58 +0200] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/oopstops (PID 5169) for job 19.
I [07/Sep/2007:18:49:58 +0200] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pstops (PID 5170) for job 19.
E [07/Sep/2007:18:50:01 +0200] PID 5170 stopped with status 1!
I [07/Sep/2007:18:50:01 +0200] Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to "debug" to find out more.
E [07/Sep/2007:18:50:01 +0200] [Job 19] Empty print file!
I [07/Sep/2007:18:50:03 +0200] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/officetops (PID 5201) for job 19.
I [07/Sep/2007:18:50:03 +0200] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/oopstops (PID 5202) for job 19.
I [07/Sep/2007:18:50:03 +0200] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pstops (PID 5203) for job 19.
E [07/Sep/2007:18:50:06 +0200] PID 5203 stopped with status 1!
I [07/Sep/2007:18:50:06 +0200] Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to "debug" to find out more.
E [07/Sep/2007:18:50:06 +0200] [Job 19] Empty print file!
---snip---

What is quite weird is that OOo spits out an empty job to STDOUT, and the whole stuff is
repeated infinitely. On the other hand, if I log in as user lp and issue the command
(as posted previously) from the command line, I get a complete PostScript job to STDOUT.

The passwd entry for user lp is:
lp:x:4:7:Printing daemon:/var/spool/lpd:/bin/bash

And, BTW, the CUPS version is 1.1.18.

Helge


-- 
Helge Blischke
Softwareentwicklung

H.Blischke at acm.org