[Scribus] Scribus broke my Printing System!

[Dave Spagnol]

Though a reboot got it going again. (Restarting cups didn't).

OK here's what happened:

I wanted to do a "letter from Santa" to my 5 year old nephew. I had a nice 
Christmas Tree in *.wmf format so I used OpenOffice Draw to convert it to 
SVG. Plus Santa's head.

Trouble with importing SVG graphics into Scribus is that you cannot adjust 
them (at least I can't work out how to). So I re-did the Tree, this time as 
*.eps. I put it into a Picture Frame, made it full page, and turned the 
opacity down to 10% to make it a background wash.

I then put Santa's head in the top left corner, used "Font in a Red Suit" for 
a Headline "Merry Christmas from Santa Claus" and two other fonts. Hobbit SF 
(like Hobo only bolder) and AvantGarde one to top and tail the letter, the 
other for the text. It looked great.

Then I tried to print it. Nothing! I tried exporting it to PDF and loaded it 
with KPDF, and the background tree showed as 100% opaque! I then tried to do 
a print preview inside Scribus, got a Sig 11 crash. I then imported the PDF 
into Acroread for Linux 5, printed it and again, nothing. Tried printing a 
test page, nothing.

I rebooted, tried printing in Acroread again, this time it printed but no 
background Tree at all! I tried Acroread in Windows 98 this time the 
background tree was there, but a few letters from the headline went missing. 
FInally I reloaded the letter into Scribus, converted the Headline text to 
paths, exported as PDF again, tried printing through Acroread again, no 
background. Tried printing through Scribus again, broke printing system 
again. Tried preview again, crashed again.

Finally went into Windows 98 and printed it correctly via Acroread!

Obviously there are problems with the hpijs/foomatic/cups drivers for my 
printer (HP3820). But it seems that the output from Scribus is too 
sophisticated for external programs to deal with, and even for its own print 
preview to deal with. Possibly the solution would be to output the file in 
some sort of bitmap form, or fade colours in the output rather than rely on 
printer drivers to do it.

I tried all of the above even loading up the Stable 1.2 version to import my 
document and try to print it, same results every time!

By the way, I didn't really want to make the graphic transparent, I just 
wanted to fade it but I couldn't see a way of doing it!

Dave

(PS don't want to complain too loudly, it's the only time I've caught Scribus 
out ever since you got to version 1.1.7)