[Foomatic] Foomatic PDF printer

Robert van den Aker robert2 at dds.nl
Thu Nov 18 15:42:14 PST 2004


I made my first attempt at a Foomatic printer description this week. It's
for a Ghostscript PDF printer with the pdfwrite driver. I got the idea for
it from http://cups-mailto.sourceforge.net/. I believe it could be useful
for the cups-mailto backend, and for CUPS backends that write printjobs to
file, such as the CUPS builtin FileDevice.

The XML data I added to my copy of foomatic-db can be found at
http://www.robert2.dds.nl/test/foomatic-db-20041106.diff-ruN. The
resulting PPD is at
http://www.robert2.dds.nl/test/Ghostscript-PDF_Printer-pdfwrite.ppd. This
PPD only offers two options besides PageSize and Resolution, namely
ProcessColorModel and PDFSettings. I think the PPD shouldn't offer too
many options because:
a. different versions of pdfwrite/Ghostscript support different options
and option values, and
b. PDFSettings is a compound option that controls the settings for several
of the options recognized by the pdfwrite Ghostscript device. The
specifics of what it does may change between versions, but it can probably
be expected to provide sane settings for a range of GS versions.

In my tests the PageSize, ProcessColorModel and PDFSettings options from
the PPD appear to have the desired effect, but Resolution doesn't seem to
have any effect on the output.

I would appreciate feedback on the XML data / the PPD, but be gentle and
remember that this is my very first Foomatic PPD.

Regards,
Robert





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