[scribus] Printing to Phaser 7400DN

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:00:11 -0400
John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> dijo:

> > This time I needed only 20 copies. I sure hope I find a better
> > way before the time comes when I need several hundred copies of
> > this cover.
> 
> You might have better luck with a different version of Linux.  I 
> guess Okular is a Debian thingie. I use Slackware, KDE, and either 
> Acroread or Kpdf for printing files.  Or I can just use lpr and 
> specify a number of copies. 

As Lars said, Okular is what Kpdf became when KDE turned 4. Its big
improvement over Kpdf is that the user can enter responses in an
editable PDF. That is, sort of. In my experience it doesn't quite do
everything, but it's getting close to matching Adobe Reader in that
department. 

As a follow-up to what I wrote last night, Okular finally failed me. I
was printing one copy over and over because Okular's "number of copies"
drop-down box is broken. I had to specify portrait in order to get
landscape. Well, it printed half a dozen copies perfectly, and then
suddenly started printing them portrait. Why? Who knows. I switched to
specifying landscape, but it still insisted on printing portrait. I
changed the default setting in the driver to landscape, but still no
joy.

By that time it was 11 pm and I needed to be able to bind the 20
demonstration copies of the book this morning, so I had to give up. I
fired up Windows and printed the covers with Adobe Reader 9.1. Even
there I had problems - for some reason it printed the 12 x 18 inch
image at about 110%. But at least I got landscape and centered on the
page, and there is an option to scale the image that resolved the
issue. You can even save your settings under a file name so you can
reset quickly next time you need to print the document. Most
interesting is why it reported the document (exported as PDF from
Scribus) as 12 x 18, yet printed it scaled up. 

I have been printing to lasers for ages, and it has always confused me.
There are settings in the printer's control panel, settings in the
driver, and settings in the applications' print dialog boxes. Many
settings appear in all three locations. In the past I was printing to
black and white laserjets, so the number of options was manageable -
that is, I could get correct output with a little poking and
experimenting. Now I have this Phaser 7400DN that blows my mind. The
number of permutations in the settings is so large that it would take
the rest of my life to try all the combinations. As a result, I don't
know if the problem is my own ineptness, a bug in the application, a
bug in CUPS or the driver, or a bug in the printer's firmware. Very
frustrating.

I do have to say that when I try to print the cover directly from
Scribus the print dialog boxes give me just about every option the
printer is capable of. I don't understand why other applications give
me only a few of the options.