[cups] Newbie seeks help / FreeBSD 12.0 / Brother MFC-7860DW

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <alpine.SOC.2.20.1906101432100.9162 at dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu>,
Tim Mooney <Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu> wrote:

>> I'm assuming that *somdewhere* I should be able to find some helpful
>> logging that will show me what CUPS thinks it is doing at each step,
>> right?
>
>Look at the man page for 'cupsctl', and pay particular attention the
>option to enable debug logging.
>
>With debug logging enabled, lots of additional debug messages will
>appear (each line with a 'D' at the beginning, for 'debug') in the cups
>error_log file, which is probably /var/log/cups/error_log.
>
>With debug logging enabled, it should show you what filters are being
>run for each job.

Thanks for that!  I'll be looking at that, definitely.  But I just found
a couple of things that I had never noticed before that -may- perhaps
indicate that my remaining printing problems might have altogether less
to do with CUPS that they have to do with Firefox.  Let me explain...

I only just now noticed, on my fresh new FreeBSD system with its fresh
new 67.0 Firefox, that when one goes to try to print something, there are
some rather unexpected things that can be found if one looks at Firefox's
"Page Setup" printing menu.  (I confess that I had not looked at that till
now.)

So, burried in Firefox's Page Setup print menu, I am being given two options...
(1) "Any Printer - For Portable Documents" and (2) "Brother_MFC-7860DW - {my
CUPS printer name}".  Now that I know these options exist, I am, of course,
choosing option #2, amd that -seems- like it -might- be making things just
-slightly- better.  (The fonts are printing out a bit more legibly now.)
But printing even something as simple as the Google home page is still
taking a LONG time, and it still isn't being formatted at all well by Firefox.
Even the Print Preview in Firefox shows Google's home page as being rendered
as a TWO-page print document!

Printing other simple pages consisting mostly of text, e.g. the CUPS in-built
Administration Menu page, is also taking a long long time, and although it
does look a bit better when I select (in Firefox) the option to pre-format
for my specific printer, some of the fonts are still comoing out totally
crappy and almost unreadable.

But it's clear to me now that most or all of these problems are actualy
problems in the FreeBSD Firefox port... and most likely NOT in CUPS.

I'll have to do some more experiments to nail this down further, but it is
looking like I need to be filing some foemal FreeBSD/Firefox bug reports.

Oh!  And another FreeBSD/Firefox bug:  The setting of the print "Format For"
menu option is NOT sticky.  Not even a little.  On each print, I have to
re-select the print formatting option for my specific printer each and
every time. :-(

Obviously, Firefox on FreeBSD need a LOT of work.  And I'll be talking to
the maintainer about that.


Regards,
rfg