[Bug 732442] New: All Postscript drivers horribly busted
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c0 Summary: All Postscript drivers horribly busted Classification: openSUSE Product: openSUSE 12.1 Version: Final Platform: x86-64 OS/Version: SuSE Other Status: NEW Severity: Major Priority: P5 - None Component: Printing AssignedTo: jsmeix@suse.com ReportedBy: roland@logikalsolutions.com QAContact: jsmeix@suse.com Found By: --- Blocker: --- User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0 Nearly every application using Qt prints garbage out when using ANY postscript driver. I helped trouble shoot this problem with some KDE people. Basically it boils down to one or more developers not knowing anything about Qt, PDF, or Postscript. They are setting the flag(s) wrong when handing off a file/document for Qt to print. PDF != postscript. When you stop all of the queues and look at the intermediary files you will find they all created PDF files, NOT POSTSCRIPT. Each of the Postscript drivers, especially the generic and Lexmark ones, expects a Poscript file. They have no idea what to do with a PDF. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Pick a networked postscript printer and change it to a Generic Level N printer driver. 2. Print from any Qt based application 3. Actual Results: You will either get complete garbage OR, the binary data will hose the driver so bad it will change the form type from NA Letter to Plain Exec. Expected Results: Nice clean printout Since I purchase higher end Lexmark printers, I had the option of using a Generic PCL driver. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c1 Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.com> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |jsmeix@suse.com Platform|x86-64 |All Component|Printing |KDE4 Applications AssignedTo|jsmeix@suse.com |kde-maintainers@suse.de QAContact|jsmeix@suse.com |qa@suse.de Summary|All Postscript drivers |Applications using Qt |horribly busted |produce PDF for printing | |which can fail on | |PostScript printers --- Comment #1 from Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.com> 2011-11-24 10:12:35 UTC --- Even though this issue is of course a printing related issue "application using Qt prints garbage" means that this issue does not belong to the Bugzilla component "Printing" which is meant only for the base printing system (i.e. CUPS and printer drivers). Because there is no Bugzilla component "Qt" but KDE applications are one of the main Qt users I change the Bugzilla component to "KDE Applications". There is a general move away from PostScript to PDF as the standard print job format. This change is advocated by the OpenPrinting workgroup of the Linux Foundation and the CUPS author, see http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting -------------------------------------------------------------------- PDF as standard print job format is completely implemented on Debian and Ubuntu and will soon get upstream standard
From Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10, released mid-October) on all important desktop applications (GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE, LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) send print jobs in PDF and not in PostScript any more by default. In addition, a complete CUPS filter chain to process print jobs in PDF is available and used by Debian and Ubuntu.
CUPS author Mike Sweet/Apple have decided to not include the Linux-specific CUPS filters in the upstream CUPS source any more and we have agreed to maintain them at OpenPrinting. Here we will do some clean-up and discontinue the PostScript-centric workflow in favor of the PDF workflow, meaning that the upstream standard for CUPS under Linux (using CUPS plus our filter package) will be the PDF-based job processing, letting every non-PDF input be converted to PDF first, page management options being applied by a pdftopdf filter and Ghostscript being called with PDF as input. Having this workflow we ask all driver developers kindly to not create any PPDs/drivers for non-Postscript printers which require exclusively PostScript. PPD files should at least accept PDF or CUPS Raster now. See also our driver design/packaging page. More info on our page about the PDF printing workflow. -------------------------------------------------------------------- This means that from the OpenPrinting workgroup and CUPS author point of viwe it is o.k. when applicatios produce PDF insetad of PostScript. As a consequence you can no longer print directly from applications which produce PDF in "raw" mode (i.e. without any filter in between which converts PDF to PostScript) to a pure PostScript printer (but many PostScript printers can also print PDF directly). I don't know if one can cofigure Qt or application using Qt or KDE so that they produce again PostScript by default. Perhaps a Qt or KDE expert can help here.
From my point of view this issue is not really a bug but an unfortunate consequence for particular printers of a generic upstream change in the printing workflow which is intended.
From my point of view this is the main reason why
FYI: Regarding "developers not knowing anything about Qt, PDF, or Postscript": It is really unfortunate that often application developers do not have sufficient knowledge about printing (I guess this is because printing is "no fun" and therefore printing is not in the focus of application developers). the printing user experience is often insufficient. Related to this you may have a look at http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2011-05/msg00629.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2011-05/msg00631.html (The whole "openSuSE 11.4 - Printing bug" thread is interesing.) Regarding printing issues in KDE 4 you may have a look at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181290#c27 "KDE 3 has a printing system, KDE 4 doesn't. Spot the difference.", and subsequent comments therein and http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2011-05/msg00500.html http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2011-05/msg00521.html -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c2 --- Comment #2 from Roland Hughes <roland@logikalsolutions.com> 2011-11-24 14:28:29 UTC --- I have run into Mike Sweet before. You can take what he knows about IT, pour it into a sewing thimble, and suddenly find room to park seven 18 wheelers. This brainiac swears computers with serial and parallel ports haven't been sold in years, yet 10 minutes searching Microcenter's Web site found no less than 30 computers and motherboards for sale containing at least one of those ports. Either later today or tomorrow I will be cutting and pasting his illuminating posts over on the AARP forums where he can find out what life is like when 50+million retired people who have nothing better to do all day than follow him around on-line is like, Printing is no fun because people like Mike, who know absolutely nothing about the industry, make the decisions. I've been a published author for multiple decades now, AND I have over 20 years in IT. I was there when PDF came about and I can tell you it CAUSES MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT SOLVES. When a print shop requests a PDF from me I know for a fact they have minimum wage (or less) workers doing their pre-flight. PDF is quite popular with POD operations, but high end ink printers still demand multiple proofs if you want to work with that format. You have to actually know IT history to understand why PDF is bad. BASIC has an ANSI standard and was supposed to be the first "portable" language students learned. I defy anyone here to port a non-trivial VAX BASIC program to Quick BASIC and then Visual Basic. COBOL has an ANSI standard and was supposed to be the first "portable" business language. I defy anyone here to port a nontrivial IBM mainframe COBOL program to ACCU-COBOL and then to MicroFocus COBOL. C has an ANSI standard and was billed as the first truly "portable" language. What a laugh that turned out to be, especially thanks to BORLAND and every other PC compiler adding their own "extensions". PDF = Portable Document Format There is no ANSI standard because PDF is a GUIDELINE. It is THE poorest choice for printing input you could ever make. BTW, I've written two books on Qt which are now ready for editing. The "default" output from a QTextDocumentWriter is ODF. You have to manually force PDF, Postscript, or any other file format. ODF, like its predecessor in the Qt world RTF, is inherently non-portable. KOffice, AbiWord, LibreOffice, and IBM's Lotus Symphony will all render the same file differently on the exact same machine. It will be even worse on other machines due to the lack of common fonts and a common cross platform rendering engine. PDF has similar problems. Yes, the document has been converted to an "image" to some extent, it still requires a rendering engine and those engines are ALL different. Not only that, but they REQUIRE accurate information to come back from the printer drivers. Take a look at the 2 png files I'm attaching. This is the exact same printer using the Generic Postscript level 2 printer driver. One section is able to obtain the resolution and the other is not. If your PDF rendering engine uses the resolution value (which most try to) consider yourself pooched! -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c3 --- Comment #3 from Roland Hughes <roland@logikalsolutions.com> 2011-11-24 14:29:43 UTC --- Created an attachment (id=463960) --> (http://bugzilla.novell.com/attachment.cgi?id=463960) one portion of the setup screens -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c4 --- Comment #4 from Roland Hughes <roland@logikalsolutions.com> 2011-11-24 14:30:26 UTC --- Created an attachment (id=463961) --> (http://bugzilla.novell.com/attachment.cgi?id=463961) another portion of the setup for the same printer -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c5 --- Comment #5 from Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.com> 2011-11-24 15:55:40 UTC --- Only FYI regarding "PDF ... CAUSES MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT SOLVES": In my personal opinion I agree. Of course PDF has advantages over PostScript but personally I think that the move from PostScript to PDF as the standard print job format happens just now when printing with PostScript as the standard print job format has become a well established matured solution (in other words there are almost no new bugs with PostScript as the standard print job format). In contast printing with PDF as the standard print job format causes currently many new bugs. E.g. the Ghostscript Bugzilla http://bugs.ghostscript.com/ is full of issues related to PDF. Unfortunately - from my point of view - free software development seems to replace too often well established matured solutions by "something better". Even if the "something better" is really better, the too often happening changes cause too many new bugs (from my point of view) which means in the end too many annoyed end-users. Which normal end-user cares about the the standard print job format as long as his printer prints correctly? -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c6 --- Comment #6 from Roland Hughes <roland@logikalsolutions.com> 2011-11-24 20:16:01 UTC --- and you know how I work around this? I had to change my driver to Generic PCL/5 and deal with less than half of the print quality/capabilities from a printer capable of turning out amazing 1200x1200 Postscript. Why does this work? The PCL path doesn't involve a (&^)(*&_)(ing PDF conversion. Mr. Mike needs to learn about the real computer business. You know, those computers actually used in business. What Apple does simply doesn't matter. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c7 Thomas Schäfer <tschaefer@t-online.de> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |tschaefer@t-online.de --- Comment #7 from Thomas Schäfer <tschaefer@t-online.de> 2012-09-14 11:57:30 UTC --- After reading these nice texts. I have no solution for this mess. I made the mistake to update a running cups-Server from Opensuse 11.X to Opensuse 12.2. All native PS-Printers (hp clj 4700, hp lj 5200) stopped working with the "recommended" PS-PPDs when printing from thunderbird, libreoffice... Firefox and acrobat still print. But how to tell the user which queue is for which application??? Then I tried the drivers called: hpijs pcl3, 3.12.4 Now thunderbird, libreoffice print - a little bit. Landscape does not work. Multiple Pages (acrobat) to save paper does not work anymore. What should I do? An older distribution? Have the ubuntu-people solved this problem? (referring to http://en.opensuse.org/Concepts_printing ) The situation is very ugly. Regards, Thomas Schäfer -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c8 --- Comment #8 from Thomas Schäfer <tschaefer@t-online.de> 2012-09-14 21:09:22 UTC --- In a productive system I cannot debug cups,PPDs and thousand filters. I tried ubuntu lts 12.04 instead. The PS-printers work so far - portrait, landscape, duplex, multiple pages per sheet and no garbage symbols, independent from the source application. But happiness with cups seems to unreachable. In my IPv6-Network I run into this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/1034539 There are better Fridays. Thomas -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c9 --- Comment #9 from Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.com> 2012-10-09 10:21:22 CEST --- Thomas Schäfer, you wrote in comment #7 "Opensuse 12.2. ... All native PS-Printers (hp clj 4700, hp lj 5200) stopped working". I guess this issue in openSUSE 12.2 is a duplicate of bnc#774627. To verify, switch in your PostScript printers that they print out PostScript errors and if you get a sheets printed with a "setoverprintmode" error message, it is actually a duplicate of bnc#774627. Regarding LibreOffice, see also bnc#781193 "LibreOffice: Cannot print landscape if it generates PDF (works for PostScript)". I think the real problem with the switch from PostScript to PDF as standard print job format is when applications cannot be easily switched back from PDF to PostScript as standard print job format both by a normal user who runs a particular application and by an admin to specify a system default print job format. I don't know if one can cofigure Qt or applications using Qt or KDE so that they produce again PostScript by default. Perhaps a Qt or KDE expert can help here (see my comment #1). I also done't know how it is for Gtk and Gnome. Perhaps a Gtk or Gnome expert can help here. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c10 --- Comment #10 from Thomas Schäfer <tschaefer@t-online.de> 2012-10-10 11:57:35 UTC --- for verification: Opensuse 12.2 KDE-Live from USB-Stick Printing PS-Errors enabled on printer. Yast2 to configure hp color Laserjet 4700 with installation of cups and hp-manufactory-PPDs. Connection via IPP. Testpage from yast was successful. Testpage(new document with one word ) from libreoffice writer results in: ERROR:undefined OFFENDING COMMAND:setoverprintmode "setoverprintmode" COMMAND TYPE:nametype test OPERAND STACK:(1 total entries) ===top of stack=== false ... -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c11 --- Comment #11 from Johannes Meixner <jsmeix@suse.com> 2012-12-21 10:42:01 CET --- Only FYI see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=776080#c55 -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442 http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c12 Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.com> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Status|NEW |RESOLVED CC| |jslaby@suse.com Resolution|--- |WONTFIX --- Comment #12 from Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.com> --- This version is out of maintenance, if you still see the problem, please reopen and move the bug to a more recent product. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.
participants (1)
-
bugzilla_noreply＠novell.com