282389 - [ps] PostScript error page needs to be tailored differently for CUPS

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

In my current Fedora Core 3 install using a trunk build of firefox from a few
days ago, the XUL element to set the "Print Command" is hidden in the UI.  This
means that apparently something strange is going on with the nsIPrintSettings
implementation, since I can't think of any reason where this shouldn't be
settable on Linux.

This is a problem, because the gecko printing engine sometimes spits out a
printout telling you specifically how to configure this to get around outdated
PostScript interpreters in a printer.

Comment 1

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

It's hidden when you're examining the "Properties..." of a CUPS printer rather
than a Postscript printer.

CUPS has its own UI for postscript filtering, and we should probably tailor the
message we print out for that if we're using a CUPS printer.

Comment 2

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Attachment: give different message for CUPS

I'm not sure what we should do about print-to-file, but I suspect it doesn't
matter all that much.  (This leaves the current message intact when printing to
a file.)

Comment 3

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Comment on attachment 174413 [details] [diff] [review]
give different message for CUPS

I was a bit terse with the text given the difficulty of writing it.

Do you think we should try to give instructions for doing this in different
distros?  I know how to do it on FC3, but I'm not sure how consistent distros
are.

On FC3, it's Menu -> System Settings -> Printers -> [printer name] -> Edit ->
Driver Options -> Ghostscript pre-filtering.

Comment 4

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

I think on some systems, CUPS is configured via an HTTP/HTML browser interface.

Comment 5

[Jungshik Shin]

This bug will be moot very soon. We're gonna generate a lot more portable
postscript than we currently do. See bug 234182. 

Comment 6

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Taking bug, although I expect to mark it wontfix once bug 234182 lands.

Comment 7

[Kenneth Herron]

Ignoring bug 234812 for the sake of argument:

(In reply to comment #3)
> I was a bit terse with the text given the difficulty of writing it.
> 
> Do you think we should try to give instructions for doing this in different
> distros?  I know how to do it on FC3, but I'm not sure how consistent distros
> are.

Perhaps a better solution would be to separate the instructions from the
postscript sequences, and have the print job object supply the text. We could
evne load the text from a separate file to support i18n/distro customization.
The postscript that actually prints the text could be generated dynamically.

Comment 8

[Kenneth Herron]

I'm going to close this. No issues have been reported about the fix for bug 234182.