How to disable PDF input?

[Michele Alessandrini]

> 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
>

Hi thank you very much for your quick reply! You're right, sniffing the traffic to the printer I can see that it outputs compressed (LZW) Postscript.
But I cannot find the perl alternate filter anywhere, all links from cups.org are broken, and no luck on google too. Do you know a working link to download it?
Thank you again
Michele