[scribus] Printing from Scribus

[ZASKE Martin]

Hello IanW and all

We are using two different size printers from Kyocera for many years
now. Those are genuine PostScript printers with their own network cards.

Kyocera has always provided very good drivers for those, so it is no
surprise that all versions of OpenSuse and Ubuntu which I have tried had
those drivers available from the install DVDs. We are using the default
CUPS with no fancy special configuration.

Setting up those printers is a breeze. And printing directly from
Scribus (via the print dialogue) is no problem. But we can tell that the
printer is doing some serious processing, with its one humble embedded
processor:

Printing under Linux in true PostScript is slower and it needs plenty
memory. We tend to upgrade our printers to max. memory (good offers from
Ebay at reasonable prices).

When we have very complex documents the file going to the printer can be
20 MB or more (CUPS has got good monitoring tools where a worried or
impatient user can observe what is (not) happening. I find it reassuring
during a long print job, to see that it is indeed progressing. The
printers also show progress or error messages on their web-interfaces.).

So sometimes a heavy transfer via network and the processing in printer
can take several minutes. Very rarely the printer runs out of memory.
Then we have to try other tricks, like exporting from Scribus to PNG and
sending that to the printer: Files get even much bigger, easily 100 MB
for an A3 page, but since the "processing" is all done to a
pixel-format, we can so even print A3 pages with any possible complexity.


During one phase (waiting for a memory upgrade) we took some of our
Scribus print-jobs to Windows and used the genuine
Kyocera-Windows-Drivers (which emulate PCL XL or PCL 5e modus but can
also run real PostScript). Under PCL mode even huge print-jobs run much
faster than under OpenSuse (same printer, same network etc). For just
one print-job it would not warrant a re-boot; we used it for the main
print runs for our magazine: 20 pages A3 and a need to run several
separate batches. (What we did, was to run an old licence of Win XP in a
virtual machine, just for printing. But once we got more memory, it was
no longer needed.)

>From my experience with several different set-ups, I would confirm that
the printer functionality in the latest stable Scribus versions are
stable indeed (1.4.x). The user should read up on his printer and
driver-options. And consider printer memory which is a real issue with
PostScript.

So a "long" wait for a print job might be "normal". The error message
"no paper" in this context points to a driver problem: Maybe the printer
is trying to say that and the driver is miss-interpreting it? 		
	My printers cannot handle the very largest complex print jobs, but
after a long wait they give me an honest "too complex" error message.

Some years ago, a friendly user helped me with analysing the complexity
question. It is amazing that just 40 labels (with so small file-sizes)
need several minutes, even printing as PDF: Is there a lot of graphic
and underlying photos? Weird fonts? Weird structure with lots of cloned
elements which need little file-space but turn out complex on paper?
What about just printing a portion (or just one label) and seeing
whether the printer can handle that.

What about other programs on that computer? Do they print fine?
Does your PClinuxOS 2013-08 use CUPS?
Do other (simple) Scribus documents print fine?


Like other users have said, direct printing from Scribus does work. So
it is worth investigating and spending some time and research to fix it.

Martin

-- 
ZASKE Martin
responsable GʊGʊ
BP 50 - Bassila - Bénin
tel GʊGʊ 66.66.11.11
tel pers 97.44.62.95