On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:00:11 -0400 John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> dijo:
> > This time I needed only 20 copies. I sure hope I find a better > > way before the time comes when I need several hundred copies of > > this cover. > > You might have better luck with a different version of Linux. I > guess Okular is a Debian thingie. I use Slackware, KDE, and either > Acroread or Kpdf for printing files. Or I can just use lpr and > specify a number of copies. As Lars said, Okular is what Kpdf became when KDE turned 4. Its big improvement over Kpdf is that the user can enter responses in an editable PDF. That is, sort of. In my experience it doesn't quite do everything, but it's getting close to matching Adobe Reader in that department. As a follow-up to what I wrote last night, Okular finally failed me. I was printing one copy over and over because Okular's "number of copies" drop-down box is broken. I had to specify portrait in order to get landscape. Well, it printed half a dozen copies perfectly, and then suddenly started printing them portrait. Why? Who knows. I switched to specifying landscape, but it still insisted on printing portrait. I changed the default setting in the driver to landscape, but still no joy. By that time it was 11 pm and I needed to be able to bind the 20 demonstration copies of the book this morning, so I had to give up. I fired up Windows and printed the covers with Adobe Reader 9.1. Even there I had problems - for some reason it printed the 12 x 18 inch image at about 110%. But at least I got landscape and centered on the page, and there is an option to scale the image that resolved the issue. You can even save your settings under a file name so you can reset quickly next time you need to print the document. Most interesting is why it reported the document (exported as PDF from Scribus) as 12 x 18, yet printed it scaled up. I have been printing to lasers for ages, and it has always confused me. There are settings in the printer's control panel, settings in the driver, and settings in the applications' print dialog boxes. Many settings appear in all three locations. In the past I was printing to black and white laserjets, so the number of options was manageable - that is, I could get correct output with a little poking and experimenting. Now I have this Phaser 7400DN that blows my mind. The number of permutations in the settings is so large that it would take the rest of my life to try all the combinations. As a result, I don't know if the problem is my own ineptness, a bug in the application, a bug in CUPS or the driver, or a bug in the printer's firmware. Very frustrating. I do have to say that when I try to print the cover directly from Scribus the print dialog boxes give me just about every option the printer is capable of. I don't understand why other applications give me only a few of the options.
