How to disable PDF input?

[Helge Blischke]

Michele Alessandrini wrote:

> Hi, excuse me all, it's a long time I cannot print anymore, our network
> printer crashes and reboots every time I send something. I have Debian
> Testing, and I discovered the problem is that recently programs have
> switched to use PDF instead of PS as job format. In LibreOffice, where
> there is an option to choose the job language, it works if I set PS, but
> all other programs have no such option. I suspect the problem is in
> PDF->PS conversion. I hope such a conversion happens, because the
> printer's PPD does not say it supports PDF! I searched a lot but I cannot
> find what I'd like to try: disable PDF input in cups, so forcing
> (hopefully) programs to output PS again. Is it possible? I tried raising
> the "cost" of pdftops in mime.convs, or commenting the whole line, but
> programs don't care and keep outputting PDF. Thank you very much. Michele
> Alessandrini

I think a suitable workaround (which requeres only a minimum of changes) is 
the following:
(1) Download (or compile from the sources) the pdftops utility from either 
the Xpdf suite (www.foolabs.com/xpdf/) or the poppler based one.
(2) replace the pdftops filter with the alternate pdftops filter (see the 
links at www.cups.org) which is - as the original filter - a wrapper but 
written in Perl, and make sure it finds the pdftops command.

I guess the reason for your problems is that many PostScript interpreters 
implemented in printers seem to have difficulties with the compressed 
PostScript generated by Ghostscript when converting from PDF. The workaround 
as described above avoids these issues.

Helge