How to disable PDF input?

Helge Blischke h.blischke at acm.org
Mon Jun 18 07:30:29 PDT 2012


Michele Alessandrini wrote:

>> 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

Oh sorry, srz.de revised their web presentation a couple of days ago, and 
all the published software / papers got lost.

I append the alternate pdftops filter here (and I'll move all the stuff I 
published there to sourceforge.net during the next couple of days).


Helge

PS: the description is only in German. Drop me an e-mail if you need an ad-
hoc translation into english.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: filter-pdftops.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 47854 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cups.org/pipermail/cups/attachments/20120618/26a836bd/attachment-0001.pdf>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: pdftops
Type: application/x-perl
Size: 11102 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cups.org/pipermail/cups/attachments/20120618/26a836bd/attachment.bin>


More information about the cups mailing list