[Foomatic] Driver maintainers?

Grant Taylor gtaylor+foodev_bgdai101304 at picante.com
Tue Oct 12 22:20:40 PDT 2004


Stian Sletner <stian at sletner.com> writes:

> First, let me thank you so much for answering my rant in such an
> understanding manner.

No problem.  After all I so rarely get constructive feedback...

> I think the main problem for the end user is that there's a wealth
> of information, but it's hard to see what's appropriate.

This I can understand.  I put a few "welcome, go here" sort directions
on the home page, but I think approximately zero people actually hit
that page first or at all.  Most visitors hit some random page via
google.  Where to go next is often nonobvious.  The navigational cues
on database pages, for example, don't really jump out at you, and
they're full of goofy nouns and acronyms.


> Some Linux user coming to linuxprinting.org to find out something
> about his printer driver will get mightily confused about which
> driver and spool system he's using, and where the driver is located,
> and what the latest version is, and who develops it, and where the
> actual source for it is, and...  and...  It's just hard to find out
> how it's all pieced together, and it's probably hard to explain,
> too.  So I'm not really criticising, but perhaps suggesting that
> there could be a way to organise such a resource in a way that makes
> it more inviting to the uninitiated.

Hmm.  There used to be a spot of overview text and a simple picture
somewhere, but I think it was in the HOWTO, which died long ago.

For now there is the cups quickstart page, which is written for users,
and some user pointers through the printer and driver database pages.
Much of the rest is developer or distributor focused.

A secondary problem is that every distribution is slightly, or even
grossly, different.  I've been doing this for 12 years now and this
problem just keeps getting *worse*, not better.


> The key here is to make the surroundings such that a community would
> thrive.  I think that the "feel" of the systems employed does have
> quite a large impact on the tendency of people to stick around.
> Make it so that people like it there, and they'll keep going there.
> I'm sorry if I'm being vague, I don't really know what kind of
> actual improvements would be successful; maybe a more full-featured
> forums system, maybe making the whole place a big wiki, maybe
> fostering IRC channels and such...

We do have a wiki system, after a fashion.  Every printer database
page has a segment of "user comments" in the middle that anybody can
edit.  It only supports text, with no markup, but for this purpose
that would just be complexity in search of a problem.

I also have a program to wikify all the prose pages on the rest of the
site.  For the moment, however, I'm still trying to recover from the
last experiment - a volunteer who collected data from forum traffic.
That resulted in dozens of unfindable pages detailing assorted random
facts that should have just gone into the database.  Took me days of
work to sort out in the end.

What I'd like to do is prune out at least half of the non-database
content, leaving behind a core set of several key documents built from
Kurt+Till content (which is generally quite comprehensive) but
translated/edited from the current Germanesque style into something a
bit more approachable size-wise.  Then wikify those, and see what
happens.

Do you think that's a useful plan, or should I target my efforts
elsewhere?


> I just don't think anyone gets that warm, cozy community feeling the
> way it is now. :)

Do you mean from an aesthetic standpoint, or a in terms of
participation?  I could do a face-lift easily enough, but I can't
really make people participate.


> Well, I am trying to look into it myself, but the problems described
> above apply.  I ended up running strace -ff on CUPS to find out
> exactly how the process went, but I got sort of stuck trying to
> follow the thread in the mess that is foomatic-rip. :)

Oh, skip CUPS and Foomatic; they're impossible to diagnose, even for
someone like me (you don't want to know how long it took me to get my
mother's new Epson to work properly).  Run your driver directly by
hand and see if it works that way.

You can find how to invoke ghostscript with your driver, at least the
way Foomatic is configured to do, on the "Execution Details" page
linked from http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_driver.cgi?driver=ljet2p
See also the man page for gs, and "gs -help", and the proper gs docs
that are probably installed in /usr/share/doc/gs-mumble/ or the like.

Offhand it looks like the thing is plugging in an A4 imagable area
that, if broken, could cause your problem.  So you could just vary the
A4 size numbers to test that.

Similarly, try using the normal resolution and pagesize options from
"man gs" or the regular gs documentation, and see if that fixes it.

If none of the above fixes it, then we look at the code a bit more.


> Let me come right out and ask the stupid question; where _is_ the
> source for this driver?

Assuming that you are indeed using the ljet2p driver, it's part of the
Ghostscript source distribution.

The ljet2p driver is in fact composed of a core of shared PCL driver
code plus assorted other modules.  The exect set of gdev*.c files is
defined in the file "devs.mak" (unless they finally evaporated the old
*mak system entirely in gs version 7 or 8).


> The third point I don't really understand.  If you mean the printer
> does this by itself, I don't think so, I used to work fine under
> Windows.  It also prints plain text ok if sent directly to it.

OK, so we know it can in fact print on the top edge.  Some printers
can't print in "obvious" places, although it's usually arranged that
the irritating unprintable margin is along the bottom.


Speaking of CUPS, are you printing PDF files directly by any chance?
A bunch of CUPS versions seem to have had a bug whereby PDF jobs were
scaled up ever so slightly, just enough that offhand one thinks it is
using the wrong margins or alignment or something.

-- 
Grant Taylor
Embedded Linux Consultant
http://www.picante.com/



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