[Samba] Printing with CUPS and PDF

Tom samba-lists at fleet.ucdavis.edu
Mon Mar 31 19:57:58 GMT 2003


Everything goes smoothly with the installation... drop 'pdfdistiller' 
into /usr/lib/cups/backend, chmod +x, restart cups service. Add a 
printer in cups with:

'lpadmin -p PDF -E -v pdf:/tmp/'

...and voila! Nothing happens. Doesn't give any errors, but it won't 
print ('lpr -P PDF foo.ps'). Delete the printer ('lpadmin -x PDF'), 
download distiller.ppd (found here: 
http://www.pentondigitalads.com/downloads/adist4.zip). Copy new ppd file 
to /usr/share/cups/model. Re-add printer with:

'lpadmin -p PDF -E -v pdf:/tmp/ -m distiller.ppd'

...and there we go! Still nothing prints. :(

I dig the simplicity of the solution at
http://printing.kde.org/downloads/
but given that it doesn't seem to work for me, I can hardly recommend 
it. Perhaps I'm missing something. Is there any documentation out there 
that's more in depth than the pdfdistiller file itself and this thread?

Thanks to all who responded to the original post!

-Tom

Kurt Pfeifle wrote:

> This is only *one* of the many options to create a "PDF printer". It is
> geared towards working with a legacy, old-fashioned spooling system.
> It will only serve your Windows clients. Should you need to support
> Unix/Linux/MacOSX clients too with your print server, you'd need to set
> up a separate PDF printer for these type of clients.
> 
> A better way to set up a PDF generation service for print clients is to
> use the PDF creating CUPS "backend" as provided on
> 
>    http://printing.kde.org/downloads/
> 
> You need the backend provided there plus a PPD for a generic PostScript
> printer (best, use the distiller.ppd as was provided once for Acrobat 3
> by Adobe -- it still floats around in various dl areas on the internet).
> 
> If you set up a printer using this backend, the PDF printer will be
> shared to all print clients, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows. Samba's
> Point and Print capabilities will even make possible to download the
> "driver" to all Windows clients (Unix clients get the "driver" through
> CUPS native capabilities).
> 
> It means you can send all formats supported by CUPS to this PDF printer:
> ASCII, image files, PS, PDF... and CUPS will take care to convert 
> everything
> to PostScript and the PDF backend will generate the PDF...

> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Kurt
> 



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