Printing from a hodgepodge of Windows clients

[Steve Bergman]

> As for PostScript jobs: they are by default (unless CUPS as been configured
> differently) fed through the pstops filter which evaluates all defaults and
> job specific settings from the printer's PPD. This may conflict with the job
> settings specified by the Windows printing system (PSCRIPT5 normally), which
> may produce results other than the submitter of the job may have intended.

Indeed, that is what happened.

>
> My suggestion to your problem is as follows:
>
> *) in your smb.conf, replace "printing = cups" by e.g. printing =SYSV or
> BSD.
>
> *) Write a script (Shell, Perl, Python, or whatever you like), say,
> process_windows_stuff, which

This was extremely helpful. But perhaps in a different way than intended. It's a very good solution, provided I'm willing to cower and let my config get sullied due to a mess which really exists somewhere else. (You gave me a good answer to the question that I asked.)

But I decided that this might be a good time for a more passive-aggressive strategy. I set up "point and shoot" driver downloads, using the cups-windows-postscript driver. And then just left "cups options = raw" commented out, thus breaking Windows printing for some fraction of users. The Windows Experts did their usual "delete the printer and reinstall" thing. And voilà! Everything is fine.

Sometimes you've just got to have some cojones in these instances. ;-)

Thanks for your help. That was what I really intended to, belatedly, say in this post.

-Steve