462871 - Under Linux (Unix Firefox (and also Thunderbird) should output send print jobs in PDF to the printing system and not in PostScript

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Till Kamppeter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3

I am Till Kamppeter, leader of the OpenPrinting work group at the Linux Foundation.

As you can see on the page referenced above OpenPrinting has agreed on switching
from PostScript to PDF as standard print job format. This decision was made
between printing system and driver developers, application developers, desktop
developers, and many major printer manufacturers.

I want to ask you whether you can switch from PostScript to PDF as print job
output format in the upcoming 3.0 series of OpenOffice.org. This should not be a
big change as OOo is already capable of generating PDF via the "Export to PDF"
function. This code could be re-used. It could also be done in a way that it is
run-time configurable whether PostScript or PDF gets generated with default set
at build time.

This does not require all distributions to switch to a PDF-centric workflow as
CUPS has a pdftops filter and so it converts the PDF input to PostScript if it
does not have the filters for disrectly working with PDF.

As you can also see on the referenced web page, KDE and Qt applications already
send jobs in PDF and OpenPrinting has organized the development of the CUPS
filters for the PDF printing workflow.

Debian and Ubuntu already include CUPS packages with PDF-based printing workflow.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
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Comment 1

[Till Kamppeter]

This was submitted accidentally. I have resubmitted it as bug 462872