Printing problems

[danboid]

This morning I tried to print a PDF under Haiku. I managed to print a test page from Haikus printer tool but I was unable to print the PDF after trying with three different apps. I'm going to compile the various issues I came across in the process in this one ticket.

Haiku includes a tool to configure printers but it does not include the gutenprint drivers that most users will require to print. I had forgot what the printer driver package was called so I opened HaikuDepot and searched for print, printing and cups and found nothing. I think HaikuDepots search could do with some improvement because it should've found gutenprint9 when I searched for print. I've noticed it doesn't find several packages that are in the repos even when I type their exact name eg mpv.

Rather than put users through this, if we don't want to include gutenprint as standard then I'd like to see the printer tool offer to download gutenprint when the user tries to add a printer if it detects gutenprint is not already installed.

I had the printer tool crash three times during the process of adding my printer. I have attached the dumps.

I eventually managed to add my printer and print a test page but some of the text on the test page is severed/cropped so you can't fully read it but I expect that it a gutenprint rather than a Haiku bug?

The first app I tried to use to print my pdf was qpdfview. It does have a print option but it didn't show my printer and also the Advanced printing tab was non functional so I was unable to print with qpdfview.

Next I tried xpdf but that was an instant write-off as it doesn't support printing so next I tried Libreoffice Draw. I was able to open my PDF but not print it because LO Draw crashes before any printing happens.

55736 x64

[bitigchi]

It might be a good idea to include printing drivers with a Haiku release.

Did you try printing from a native software, like StyledEdit? As far as I know, printing is not implemented yet for Qt applications. If so, please report it here[1].

[1] ​https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports

[danboid]

I have been able to print from StyledEdit but I literally never print directly from a text editor. I would always format it in LO Writer (or something like gimp) first if I was wanting to print it.

I presume Haiku is missing a native PDF reader then? That seems like a big omission to me. Is no-one working on Qt printing support or a native PDF viewer?

Another issue I came across when trying to print my PDF was that I was unable to set qpdfview as the default program to open pdfs with after installing it. It showed up in the Haiku menu fine.

[bitigchi]

There is BePDF (included in the release build) and Document Viewer in HaikuDepot, both native.

Please open a ticket in Haiku Ports (link above) about the printing issues.

[bruno]

See bug number #13313 Search for pdf translator in HaikuDeot Search for Gutenprint too...

[bruno]

You can print pdfs with BePdf

[danboid]

I've not checked b3 but BePDF doesn't seem to be included in the latest x64 nightly build and nor does it seem that I can install it via pkgman.

[humdinger]

BePDF isn't included in nightlies. How does "seem" not to be installable with pkgman. What command do you use, what's the error? Don't you see in HaikuDepot either? All working fine here...

[danboid]

I did get bepdf installed. I thought I couldn't install it because it didn't show up when I ran:

pkgman search pdf

DocumentViewer also failed to print. I had the same issue with DV as qpdfview in that Haiku didn't seem to want to let me open PDFs by default with it. It was in the Haiku menu but not in the list of apps available to 'open with...'

I did get BePDF to print but only the first page of my pdf. Its print window is a bit confusing because it has both a 'Pages' and 'Page' option and these two would see to conflict. I was unable to get BePDF to print the second page of my document, it would only print p1.

[danboid]

I had the printing option Pages set to 'All pages' when trying to print from BePDF but entering 2 in the Page option would still only print page 1.

I would suggest the Pages drop down menu be scrapped and rename Page to Pages and have it work like it does in every other OS where you can either enter a single page number, a range or a comma separated list of pages to print.

[nephele]

The nightlies deliberately include less stuff, they are intended for development.

Gutenprint should be installed already on the beta releases, I atleast cannot recall ever having to install gutenprint. After configuring my printer to use the correct gutenprint driver printing does work.
However:

• the printer configuration dialog is hard to use
• we lack autoconfig for usb printers
• we lack airprint client support
• we lack airprint server support (to publish us printers on the network)

Anyhow, such metatickets such as this are hard tp track what is and is not fixed, and for many items there are tickets already. For your printserver crashes please open a seperate ticket so that can be investigated seperately to this discussion.

[danboid]

Feel free to close this and I'll open separate, focused bug reports for these issues.

[cocobean]

Hello.... Qt printing isn't setup/enabled yet. I created a ticket in Haikuports for this as 3DEyes maintains Qt. Mainly for LibreOffice printer support. Otherwise, Haiku has working print drivers...

1. You can use BePDF for PDF file printing.
2. You can use Pe and StyledEdit for text file printing.
3. Otter Browser prints webpages to PDF.

I use wireless PCL5/PCL6-supported printers which work in color mode on Haiku. Gutenprint lacked a few features for certain printers.

There are some AGG rendering issues/concerns (see: Printer test page rendering). Other issues are probably application related.

[danboid]

Hi Cocobean

Its funny that you should comment on this ticket today because I also returned to check this out again and the main problem for me, apart from LIbreoffice not being able to print directly to my printer, is that BePDF cannot print a range of pages. I have only been able to get it to print one page at a time.

I opened a large, several hubdred page pdf (the 'Programming the Be OS' pdf) and I tried to print the first 2 pages by specifying

1-2

or

1,2

In the first BePDF print dialog, then set the start page to 1 and end page to 2 in the second BePDF print window but it only prints the first page.

I should open a ticket for this if there isn't one already...

[danboid]

I've opened this ticket for only being able to print the first page of a range:

​https://github.com/HaikuArchives/BePDF/issues/112

EDIT

Oops!

Closed that ticket. I had the only print odd pages option set.

[cocobean]

Ah! You might see that you control this through the "print job setup - Print range option (all/selected pages)". Most of the "advanced" print options - like Quality (color/B&W/Gray) and Print Preview (important) are in the "print job setup" applet.

You can also bring up PDFs in LibreOffice Draw. Qt printing is as mentioned earlier.