Lars, I haven't seen any responses to your email, so let me see if I can answer them .......
Lars Tunkrans wrote: > I have been pondering the relationship between the Staroffice printing > engine > and the Unix (foomatic ) Spooler . > > As we plug PPD's into StarOffice ( spadmin) I assume it produces > Postscript output. > when I set up a foomatic LP printer with print manager it sets the printer > content type to postscript. but does not set the Terminfo type to PS. > > So appearantly StarOffice does the right thing producing postscript > output > to a printer queue expecting postscript input. > > But what if we have a non postscript printqueue set up with just the > netstandard > interface script , connected to a postscript capable printer. > I assume I should then manually set the : > > # lpadmin -p prname -I postscript -T PS this makes the print queue become a postscript q. The '-I <input-type> option configures the q so that it can only except data that is of the type 'postscript'. The '-T <printer-type>' I think is not needed any more for most modern printers, if I remember correctly it's something to do with control characters that the printer can accept (Norm?). So having configured the q as 'postscript' and none PostScript jobs sent to the q should get converted by a suitable filter prior to it being passed to the printer. So PostScript output from StarOffice should be printed on this q as is. > > on the printer to prevent the "catv" filter being run. > > # lpfilter -l -f catv > > > Is there anyway the foomatic stuff can harm the Postscript > output that comes from StarOffice ? > Is StarOffice better off without foomatic ? A print q that is set up to use one of the foomatic, or other, PPD files is configured to accept input data of the type 'postscript'. If the data type is not 'postscript' it is converted by the 'a2ps' (any to postscript) filter to postscript. The queue's foomatic interface script uses foomatic-rip to modify the input postscript to add any user options and PPD settings (eg. paper size, margins, etc) that are appropriate for the target printer. foomatic-rip also uses ghostscript to convert the postscript to the data format required by the printer; in the case of a PostScript printer is does not need to convert it. So PostScript data created by StarOffice, and sent to a foomatic print q that is servicing a PostScript printer, should only be modified to add any settings that the queue's PPD file tells it are appropriate for its printer (eg, page size, etc). So if the output from StarOffice is compatible with the queue's PPD setting then it should not harm the resultant printed output. But if they are not compatible then it might change it, eg. if StarOffice outputs 'letter' paper size and the queue's PPD file says it has 'A4' paper then it should convert it, thus maybe screwing up the formatting. I'm not too sure how you tell StarOffice which PPD file it should use, but I guess both StarOffice and the print q should be using the same one to get the best result. I hope that helps Paul
