[Scribus] printing canon printers

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 21:02 -0800, Bart Alberti wrote:

> Printing in LINUX is not easy at all.

In general, I have to agree. Oddly, it's easier with big, expensive,
complicated network PostScript printers than it is with inkjets -
largely because the big printers follow well defined standards.

> I do not care how brilliant our coders
> in 'C' are. If the product cannot be delivered to the user easily it is NO
> GOOD.

Now there, I think you've got the wrong way of it. It might be no good
to you for what you want it for, but that doesn't make it no good. Not
as good, yes, but not no good at all.

Remember, only one part of the Linux "community" even views it as a
"product". To many it's a project and a hobby. Open Source developers
aren't all working on a product roadmap for their dayjobs ;-) . Now,
many or even most still care about making it easy to use and easy to
distribute, but not necessarily because of commercial-development style
thinking about products and delivery.

I happen to agree that consumer-level printing under Linux is a right
mess, and that even "enterprise" level printing is in a much weaker
state than it should be. It is, however, a darn sight better than what
we had two years ago, and it's still getting better at a fair clip. I
don't think it's reasonable to write it off just because there are some
problems with it.

> I say this as a user and friend of Linux. I am sending this message
> from my Win doze box which I was about to junk!
> 
> CUPS uses, it seems, [GhostScript] for non [PostScript] printers and that is
> always a notch or two behind for all the distributions.

Correct. In no small part thanks to work and negotiation by Peter
Linnell, this is now slowly changing and distros are beginning to pick
up newer versions of GhostScript. I understand part of the problem was
that the ESP patches to gs, needed by CUPS, weren't compatible with gs8
and weren't in a state where they could be integrated into the mainline
ghostscript. I think that's now resolved or on its way to being
resolved.

--
Craig Ringer