[Foomatic] ANNOUNCEMENT: Foomatic 3.0.1 released!

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmx.net
Wed Feb 18 20:10:55 PST 2004


Oi,

this is Foomatic 3.0.1, the second stable release in the Foomatic 3.0.x 
series.

Compared to Foomatic 3.0.0 the most notable new features are: CUPS 
drivers can be used with any spooler, better compatibility of the PPDs 
to the Adobe specifications and to Windows, better PJL support, 
workaround for bug in OpenOffice.org 1.1, LPRng improvements, clean-up 
of Perl scripts, enhancements on *BSD compatibility.

Thanks to all contributors, especially to Patrick Powell from LPRng for 
the Perl code clean-up and many improvements on the Foomatic scripts, 
not only for better interoperation with LPRng, to Tim Waugh from Red Hat 
for the perltoxml() function, and to Bruce J. A. Nourish and Florian 
Diesch for the *BSD fixes.

Give your comments and suggestions for the further development on the
Foomatic Development List/Newsgroup on linuxprinting.org.

See details and how to proceed below.

Happy printing!

     Till


Changes
-------

  - CUPS raster drivers can now be used with any spooler. This makes a
    lot of newer commercial or manufacturer-supplied printer drivers
    available for non-CUPS environments. To use a CUPS raster driver
    with a spooler other than CUPS, you need to install GhostScript
    (preferrably ESP GhostScript) with CUPS raster support, the
    appropriate CUPS raster driver. You do not need to install the
    complete CUPS package, the CUPS libraries are enough (libcups and
    libcupsimage, usually in the "libcups" package of your
    distribution) and to compile CUPS raster drivers you need also the
    header files of the CUPS library (libcups-devel, cupsys-dev, or
    similar package of your distro). Then you can set up a print queue
    with the PPD file of the CUPS driver the same way as if you had a
    native PostScript printer.

  - If a printer/driver combo has Foomatic-defined JCL options and the
    driver already generates a JCL header, the JCL options are merged
    into the header produced by the driver.

  - Workaround for newly introduced PostScript generation bug of
    OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 (OOo puts settings for whole document into
    "%%PageSetup" section of first page).

  - Added "use strict;" to the most important Perl scripts, clean-up of
    the scripts (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng)

  - Improved LPRng support (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng)

  - Printer listing options and auto-selection of recommended driver
    for the PPD generator foomatic-ppdfile (Thanks to Patrick Powell
    from LPRng).

  - Support for string options and additional operation modes for
    foomatic-addpjloptions (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng).

  - Additional checks in the configure scripts (Thanks to Patrick
    Powell from LPRng).

  - Composite options can be nested now (normal and forced composite
    options can be mixed).

  - Several modifications to make the PPD files compatible with the
    PostScript drivers for Windows: 100 instead of 999 choices for the
    "Copies" options, no "," and "+" in the "*NickName" and
    "*ShortNickName" entries, optional cutting of the long names of the
    options and choices (translation strings in the PPDs) to 39
    characters for compatibility with the Microsoft PostScript driver
    and the original PostScript driver for Windows of CUPS. All this is
    not required by the Adobe specification for PPD files.

  - Compatibility fixes for IRIX and the *BSD operating systems.

  - Script to update the "gimp-print" driver entry in the database
    using the src/foomatic/foomatic-printermap file of the source
    tarball of GIMP-Print 4.2.x.

  - perltoxml() Perl function in DB.pm to generate XML database entries
    from PPD files (thanks to Tim Waugh from Red Hat).

  - Let foomatic-ppdfile (which can be also called under the name
    "foomatic-datafile", for compatibility with frontends) accept
    and ignore the "-t" option for backwards compatibility. Now
    the KDE Printing Manager works correctly again.

  - Fixed PPD file generation so that the files pass the "cupstestppd"
    of CUPS 1.1.20.


Packages
--------

The release consists of two packages:

http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/foomatic-filters-3.0.1.tar.gz
http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/foomatic-db-engine-3.0.1.tar.gz

It is recommended to also update foomatic-db and foomatic-db-hpijs from
the CVS or from http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/ (daily
snapshots look for the "-current" files). As the database is regularly 
updated for new printers and drivers, there are no special releases for 
it, please use the last daily snapshot for distributions (the date can 
be considered as version number). foomatic-db-hpijs releases are coupled 
with releases of HPIJS (http://hpinkjet.sf.net/).

The packages should be installed in the following order:

    1. foomatic-filters
    2. foomatic-db
    3. foomatic-db-hpijs
    4. foomatic-db-engine


Please read the USAGE files to know how to install and use these
packages. You do not necessarily need to install foomatic-db-hpijs, you
only need it when you want to use a printer with the HPIJS driver.

Uninstall any old version of Foomatic before you install these packages.

To set up print queues for any supported spooler (CUPS, LPRng, LPD,
GNUlpr, PPR, PDQ, CPS, no spooler) use "foomatic-configure" as described
in the USAGE file of foomatic-db-engine. You can set up printer queues
based on the Foomatic database, with PPD files for PostScript printers,
with CUPS raster drivers, or raw queues. This is possible for all
spoolers. You can also print a wide range of file types with every
spooler (when you use LPRng, LPD, GNUlpr, PDQ, CPS, or no spooler you
need "a2ps" on your machine).

If you want to know how all this works, see the README files of both the
foomatic-db-engine and foomatic-filters packages.


Web site
--------

Alternatively you can download all what you need for setting up a print
queue from the web. Go simply to the usual site:

        http://www.linuxprinting.org/








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