[Scribus] Scribus broke my Printing System!

[Craig Bradney]

On Friday 10 December 2004 22:26, Dave Spagnol wrote:
> 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.

Ungroup the SVG once imported and you can do whatever you want with it. They 
are pure Scribus vectors.

> 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.

Scribus prints at Postscript Level 3. If your printer is not PS3 capable, go 
into Advanced Options on the print dialog and choose PS2. If that doesnt 
work, export to PDF and print at PS2 level from its print dialog. You should 
not have a problem with those options.

Yes, Scribus is more advanced than its own print preview.. simply because its 
done with ghostscript files to get the CMYK plate preview and Postscript 
doesnt support transparencies and Scribus and SVG and PDF do. Without 
transparencies, your print preview should be spot on. You should be using 
Ghostscript 8.1x if possible.

If you get a crash from Scribus, please let us know. We need a few more 
details like distro, if u compiled Scribus yourself, plus ghostscript 
version. etc. 

See how you go with those suggestions. 1.2.1 is just around the corner btw. :)

regards
Craig
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