On 2018-07-21 05:15, Anton Aylward wrote:

On 20/07/18 11:07 PM, Stevens wrote:

...

Linda, all my software pops up a window as you describe when I click on print that gives me the option of either printing or sending the content to a pdf file in the location I choose. I naturally assumed that behaviour was consistent across distros as both opensuse and ubuntu work that way here.

Same here. I can't recall how the software handles printers defined in SAMBA, but I recall that it did.

When a Linux application prints to file, the result was always a Postscript file. Recently, it has shifted to PDF instead or also.

David C. Rankin wrote:

...

Looking for something like Adobe's "Pdf-printer" software that they used to sell...that would act as an installed printer on Windows -- that you just printed to -- and a popup would ask for the name of the file for it to save-to, but that would run on linux.

Linda,

There are several ways to approach this. Most boil down to sending a postscript file to cups when then provides a pseudo-printer that calls ps2pdf on the input and saves the result a file (and it does a very, very good job)

The package is 'cups-pdf' and and is available in Main OSS repo. (use this option first, it automates what you can do manually) The documentation is good for cups-pdf and the generated pdf usually end up in /var/spool/cups-pdf which you can softlink as required.

--- I want to be able to print to the printer via the net so my other linux and win machines can print to it...

When I print to a printer, on my local net, from Windows, I first add it as a printer. From then on, when I print to that driver, say, 'Adobe PDF', or 'Dell MFP Laser', if using a gui, would pop give me option to change settings before print, handled by the sys-local printer driver for the device. Different printers supported different destinations -- like the Dell only supported 'MFP' output to itself or to a file, in, I believe PCL format. There was an option to print to install a PS (PostScript) version that would print to postsript, but it only handled things like page size -- not much with all the other options of the printer -- color type, color, font types, etc.

The adobe driver only supported printing to a local file in PDF form and had options for PDF production, but free driver 'PDFCreator' only supports page sizing, dpi, color ICM, fonts (system or printer fonts), scaling, as well as PS options. That one appears to internally print to PS, and convert to PDF for final output, but not sure.

So wanted something similar to the above -- could change options via the driver like in a win-printer driver, or via an X popup -- then I can print to my Documents dir (same dir whether running Win or Lin) or wherever -- most of subdirs in my home dir are the same dirs, though ones that contain sys-specific code like '~/bin' are usually local copies.

But for most print stuff that I want to save, it goes to my Documents dir which is the same for different machines.

Maybe going the samba route might work -- but my samba version (last of the 3.6.x series) is a bit long in tooth as it's optimized for local HW + UserId's/authorizations which work fine from a passwd+group file w/no need for a database or LDAP or Kerboros type back-end.

Last I looked, cups was going the opposite direction of being a stand-alone print-server -- pulling in in things like kerberos, dbus, systemd, usb, wireless rpm(?!), and required, *hidden* versions of various libs that require constant attention and/or building to be compat with previous progs. Can't very well pick up new progs that have incompat settings with older suse and 3rd party apps that have yet to be ported (if ever) to current releases.

It looked like a big effort to support any cups-based printers without going with a new system base -- perhaps more easily doable with the kernel providing/compiling virtual-box's drivers w/ each release or update -- thus making it easier to keep a kernel and virtbox instance in sync, but haven't set any of those up yet.

I also have this setup manually via samba and a shell script on an old install and the printer shared via a samba printer over the lan. You simply create a shared printer, choose any old color-postscript printer to use as the printer driver and share the printer via cups/samba (old Apple and HP drivers color postscript drivers work well).

--- Those are likely my best bet, but the fact that they are 'old' now, makes them ripe for discontinuation in near future. I am strongly trying to stay off various self-feeding viruses like Win10 that cause new system instabilities and incompats w/each version -- and linux equivalents. Too often new SW requirements have taken far too much time -- often with more small features here and there, being thrown into the 'unsupported' category.

The samba share for something like this is:

[pdf-gen] comment = PDF Generator print-pdf path = /var/tmp printable = Yes print ok = Yes printing = bsd print command = /usr/share/samba/scripts/print-pdf "%s" "%H/pdf" "//%L/%u" "%m" "%I" "%J" & lpq command = /bin/true lprm command = lprm -P'%p' %j

(newer samba will complain about `printing=bsd`, but it works fine and I haven't taken the time to reconfigure this old box) The destination "%H/pdf" will output the pdf in the user's $HOME/pdf directory.

--- Good to know...yeah newer samba provides a chunk of incompats with a sufficiently well working, small setup.

The script itself, /usr/share/samba/scripts/print-pdf, is pasted at http://paste.opensuse.org/16628214 if you want to go that route.

--- Keeping that ref 'inline' since at least I will have local copies of my outgoing email.

Either way works, but the cups-pdf is the standard now. This will give you print to pdf from any application than can use a cups printer. (which is basically everything, you can even use lpd to send to the printer)

--- That sounds like a bonus...

Thnx... Linda