[Scribus] Printing tabloid landscape to Laserjet 5SiMx - Help!

[Scott Karns]

--- John Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:

> At this point I' no longer positive that I have the
> right PPD. In fact, I 
> can't even figure out what is installed. A search of
> *.ppd revealed:
> 
> /etc/cups/ppd/laserjet5Si.ppd                 25,431
>   6/25/2005
> /usr/share/cups/model/HPLJ5SIM.PPD   36,762  
> 6/25/2005
> 

John,

You're not alone in thinking that linux printing has a
long way to go! I seem to do battle with CUPS
periodically, even when things seem to be nice, stable
and functioning as expected.

To your issue with the .ppd files, on my CUPS print
server, /etc/cups/printers.conf specifies the printers
available. For each <Printer fooprinter> or
<DefaultPrinter barprinter> from
/etc/cups/printers.conf, there should be a
corresponding .ppd file found in /etc/cups/ppd, i.e.,
fooprinter.ppd and barprinter.ppd.

When I have encountered problems with the PPDs
supplied by my distro, I have checked at
http://www.linuxprinting.org/printer_list.cgi for any
hints. In your case, The information given for an HP
5Si is:

General driver notes: Generic Postscript "driver".
Generally, for Postscript printers, you will not need
a driver, as all applications produce PostScript. For
the printing system getting access to the
printer-specific features the manufacturer supplies a
PPD file for every PostScript printer. Use this PPD
file instead of a Foomatic-generated one to get all
functionality of your PostScript printer working. The
files provided by Foomatic are generic files which
contain only some standard options, use them only if
you do not find an appropriate PPD for your printer.

So, it sounds to me like you should track down the PPD
supplied by HP for your printer. Once you have a
candidate, just copy it over the existing PPD in
/etc/cups/ppd. Of course, you'll want to save a copy
of the original ppd as a backup. After the copy, just
restart the CUPS daemon and give it a try.

Good luck!
Scott



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