[Qt-interest] Need help printing

[Scott Aron Bloom]

What platform is this? Windoze, CUPS?

If it is CUPS - I had a bit of fun a while back debugging the path of a 
document through it...

It has a habit of being slow for some file formats.

CUPS (like the old lp/lpr based system) is a filter-chain setup: it 
understands a variety of formats and then makes sure they are converted 
until they hit a printer native format. Depending on the printer driver
the 
formats that are considered native can be PS, PDF, PCL, etc.pp.

Qt outputs PDF (which is the IPP/CUPS default format since a few
versions, 
before that it used to be PS). Depending on your printer setup that PDF
is 
either converted to PCL directly or filtered through pdftops first. The 
latter has a few gotchas - there is a CUPS implementation of that
filter, 
but some Linux distributions (eg. Debian/etch) replace it with the
upstream 
pdftops and introduce a few problems (like faulty page sizing or
printing 
delays) along the way.

In order to find out what went wrong:

*print to a PDF file and then print this file with lpr - see if it makes
a 
difference (yes: it's Qts fault, no: it's CUPS' fault)

*convert the PDF to PS and print (faster: something is wrong with
pdftops, 
still slow: it gets complicated here)

*if you don't have it yet, you need to read a lot about CUPS format
filters 
and debug the path of the document through the filters (there is a
verbose 
setting for CUPS that at least lets you see what filters are started in
the 
logs - apart from lots of junk you weren't interested in)


	Konrad

0=-----------------
Its not CUPS it's a Windows box, with a HP printer and printer driver.
Ill look into setting up a PS based driver for the printer.