Tom samba-lists at fleet.ucdavis.edu wrote on Samba-Digest:
Mon Mar 31 11:57:58 GMT 2003
Everything goes smoothly with the installation... drop 'pdfdistiller' into /usr/lib/cups/backend,
I hope you didn't use "copy'n'paste" from your browser, but "Save as..." to get it?
chmod +x, restart cups service. Add a printer in cups with:
'lpadmin -p PDF -E -v pdf:/tmp/'
...and voila! Nothing happens.
Of course not. You have not yet associated a PPD with it, which means you are running it as a "raw" printer.
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. :(
OK.
Did you re-start cupsd after dropping the "distiller.ppd" into "/usr/share/cups/model/" ? This is required to allow CUPS to rebuild its cache of available PPDs from that directory. Only if there is a valid cache, you can install the PPD using the "-m" parameter without the path.
Otherwise use the absolute path; then you don't need to re-start cupsd after updating your PPD "model" directory:
'lpadmin -p PDF -E -v pdf:/tmp/ -P /usr/share/cups/model/distiller.ppd'
Do you see a "/etc/cups/ppd/PDF.ppd" ?
To check if CUPS is recogizing the newly available backend, let root run
"lpinfo -v"
and grep for "pdf".
To check if it basically works as a backend, first run it with no arguments:
"/usr/lib/cups/backend/pdfdistiller"
and it should output
'direct pdf "Unknown" "PDF Writing"'
Then run it with a wrong number of arguments (use 1, 2, 3, or 4 dummy arguments)
"/usr/lib/cups/backend/pdfdistiller 1 2 a b"
and it should output
"Usage: pdf job-id user title copies options [file]"
The PDF should go to "/tmp/", according to your installation. Backends are running as root, and for paranoid security you may not want to write files as root into "/tmp/". Better use a separate directory with access rights you need:
"lpadmin -p PDF -E -v pdf:/home/username/pdfs/ -P /usr/share/cups/model/distiller.ppd"
Further, the script relies on "ps2pdf" to be present on your system. Do you get an answer to this:
"which ps2pdf"
Last: If you want to get some more debugging info into the CUPS error_log (in "/var/log/cups/error_log"), insert this line
"set -x"
into the "pdfdistiller" as the right after the first line. Set cupsd.conf to "LogLevel debug" and re-start cupsd.
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.
You don't need to recommend it -- *I'll* be doing 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?
Hmmm... I just checked and the detailled README I once put there has gone. Need to dig it out again.
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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