this is Foomatic 3.0.1rc1, a prerelease of the upcoming stable release 3.0.1.
Compared to Foomatic 3.0.0 CUPS raster drivers can now be used with every spooler, many bug fixes were done, the multi-platform compatibility was improved, the compatibility of the PPDs with Windows clients is much better now, and several features were added.
Especially it is now worked around a bug in the PostScript output of OpenOffice 1.1 (which made option settings only apply to the first page), PJL options (printer-specific, driver-independent options as EconoMode, Media Type, Toner Density, ...) for laser printers are now available with all drivers (esp. "HPIJS" and "gdi"), setting the resolution with the "pxlmono" driver works now.
Thanks especially to Patrick Powell from LPRng for the Perl code clean-up and many improvements on the Foomatic scripts, not only for better interoperation with LPRng.
Give your comments and suggestions for the further development on the Foomatic Development List/Newsgroup on linuxprinting.org.
See details and how to proceed below.
Happy printing!
Till
Changes -------
Compared to Foomatic 3.0.0
- CUPS raster drivers can now be used with any spooler. This makes a lot of newer commercial or manufacturer-supplied printer drivers available for non-CUPS environments. To use a CUPS raster driver with a spooler other than CUPS, you need to install GhostScript (preferrably ESP GhostScript) with CUPS raster support, the appropriate CUPS raster driver. You do not need to install the complete CUPS package, the CUPS libraries are enough (libcups and libcupsimage, usually in the "libcups" package of your distribution) and to compile CUPS raster drivers you need also the header files of the CUPS library (libcups-devel, cupsys-dev, or similar package of your distro). Then you can set up a print queue with the PPD file of the CUPS driver the same way as if you had a native PostScript printer.
- If a printer/driver combo has Foomatic-defined JCL options and the driver already generates a JCL header, the JCL options are merged into the header produced by the driver. This way the JCL (usually PJL) options of the printers get available for the drivers "hpijs", "pxlmono", and "gdi".
- Workaround for newly introduced PostScript generation bug of OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 (OOo puts settings for whole document into "%%PageSetup" section of first page).
- Added "use strict;" to the most important Perl scripts (this makes debugging much easier, as every variable has to be declared with "my ..." or "our ..."), clean-up of the scripts (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng)
- Improved LPRng support (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng)
- Printer listing options and auto-selection of recommended driver for the PPD generator foomatic-ppdfile (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng).
- Support for string options and additional operation modes for foomatic-addpjloptions (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng).
- Additional checks in the configure scripts (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng).
- Composite options can be nested now (normal and forced composite options can be mixed).
- Several modifications to make the PPD files compatible with the PostScript drivers for Windows: 100 instead of 999 choices for the "Copies" options, no "," and "+" in the "*NickName" and "*ShortNickName" entries, optional cutting of the long names of the options and choices (translation strings in the PPDs) to 39 characters for compatibility with the Microsoft PostScript driver and the original PostScript driver for Windows of CUPS. All this is not required by the Adobe specification for PPD files.
- Compatibility fixes for IRIX and the *BSD operating systems.
Packages --------
The release consists of two packages:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/foomatic-filters-3.0.1rc1.tar.gz http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/foomatic-db-engine-3.0.1rc1.tar.gz
It is recommended to also update foomatic-db and foomatic-db-hpijs from the CVS or from http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/
The packages should be installed in the following order:
1. foomatic-filters 2. foomatic-db 3. foomatic-db-hpijs 4. foomatic-db-engine
Please read the USAGE files to know how to install and use these packages. You do not necessarily need to install foomatic-db-hpijs, you only need it when you want to use a printer with the HPIJS driver.
Uninstall any old version of Foomatic before you install these packages.
To set up print queues for any supported spooler (CUPS, LPRng, LPD,
GNUlpr, PPR, PDQ, CPS, no spooler) use "foomatic-configure" as described
in the USAGE file of foomatic-db-engine. You can set up printer queues
based on the Foomatic database, with PPD files for PostScript printers, with CUPS raster drivers, or raw queues. This is possible for all spoolers. You can also print a wide range of file types with every spooler (when you use LPRng, LPD, GNUlpr, PDQ, CPS, or no spooler you need "a2ps" on your machine).
If you want to know how all this works, see the README files of both the foomatic-db-engine and foomatic-filters packages.
Web site --------
Alternatively you can download all what you need for setting up a print queue from the web. Go simply to the usual site:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/
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