[Desktop_architects] Presentation slides - with attached templates

[Till Kamppeter]

Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> On Monday 05 December 2005 22:32, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> 
>>     -->
>>      Use of GhostScript for PostScript printers is not standard with
>>      linuxprinting.org. It is an exception, 
> 
> 
> This is not my impression any more. It happens far more often than is
> healthy for my inner balance  ;-)
> 
> I receive quite a few inquiries from customers who were happy that 
> linuxprinting.org/Foomatic seemed to ship PPDs for their PostScript
> printers, and then turned to me asking "WTF? What is this foomatic-?*&#
> doing to my printers?"
>

Unfortunately, not all distros ship the manufacturer-supplied PPDs which 
are released as free software and published on linuxprinting.org. So 
often PostScript printers get set up with generic PPDs from Foomatic 
containing only a very rudimentary option set. To make adoption of 
manufacturer-supplied PPDs easier for distros, I have included the PPDs 
in the foomatic-db package some weeks ago and made the 
foomatic-configure, foomatic-ppdfile, and foomatic-compiledb tools 
making use of them.

In addition, the widely used Red Hat/Fedora distro had (still has?) a 
printer setup tool which exclusively used the Foomatic XML database to 
generate PPDs and did not look for PPDs in /usr/share/cups/model/. Tim, 
did you change that already?

> I'll research a bit more and come back to this topic.
> 
> 
>>      only being done if the 
>>      printers is of a lower PostScript level than the PostScript input
>>      coming from the applications. It must be manually activated
>>      (usually GhostScript is not called) and is only needed for very old
>>      printers.
> 
> 
> I recently saw dozens and dozens of entries in a "foomatic-ppd" 
> subdirectory when outputting "lpinfo -m" for Infotec printer models 
> which even had the "recommmended" tag on them... This is not good!
> 

These PPDs are original manufacturer PPDs which were released as free 
software by the manufacturers. I have included them in the CVS of the 
foomatic-db package, so that it gets easier for distros to include them. 
  The current CVS contains PPDs from Ricoh and partners (Infotec, 
Gestetner, ...) which give full support for the appropriate printers, 
including job hold and user/password features.

    Till