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From: Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmx.net>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 17:43:40 +0100
Subject: PPR: ANNOUNCEMENT: Foomatic 3.0.1rc1 released!
Oi,
this is Foomatic 3.0.1rc1, a prerelease of the upcoming stable release
3.0.1.
Compared to Foomatic 3.0.0 CUPS raster drivers can now be used with
every spooler, many bug fixes were done, the multi-platform
compatibility was improved, the compatibility of the PPDs with Windows
clients is much better now, and several features were added.
Especially it is now worked around a bug in the PostScript output of
OpenOffice 1.1 (which made option settings only apply to the first
page), PJL options (printer-specific, driver-independent options as
EconoMode, Media Type, Toner Density, ...) for laser printers are now
available with all drivers (esp. "HPIJS" and "gdi"), setting the
resolution with the "pxlmono" driver works now.
Thanks especially to Patrick Powell from LPRng for the Perl code
clean-up and many improvements on the Foomatic scripts, not only for
better interoperation with LPRng.
Give your comments and suggestions for the further development on the
Foomatic Development List/Newsgroup on linuxprinting.org.
See details and how to proceed below.
Happy printing!
Till
Changes
- -------
Compared to Foomatic 3.0.0
- CUPS raster drivers can now be used with any spooler. This makes a
lot of newer commercial or manufacturer-supplied printer drivers
available for non-CUPS environments. To use a CUPS raster driver with
a spooler other than CUPS, you need to install GhostScript
(preferrably ESP GhostScript) with CUPS raster support, the
appropriate CUPS raster driver. You do not need to install the
complete CUPS package, the CUPS libraries are enough (libcups and
libcupsimage, usually in the "libcups" package of your distribution)
and to compile CUPS raster drivers you need also the header files of
the CUPS library (libcups-devel, cupsys-dev, or similar package of
your distro). Then you can set up a print queue with the PPD file of
the CUPS driver the same way as if you had a native PostScript
printer.
- If a printer/driver combo has Foomatic-defined JCL options and the
driver already generates a JCL header, the JCL options are merged
into the header produced by the driver. This way the JCL (usually
PJL) options of the printers get available for the drivers
"hpijs", "pxlmono", and "gdi".
- Workaround for newly introduced PostScript generation bug of
OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 (OOo puts settings for whole document into
"%%PageSetup" section of first page).
- Added "use strict;" to the most important Perl scripts (this makes
debugging much easier, as every variable has to be declared with "my
..." or "our ..."), clean-up of the scripts (Thanks to Patrick Powell
from LPRng)
- Improved LPRng support (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng)
- Printer listing options and auto-selection of recommended driver
for the PPD generator foomatic-ppdfile (Thanks to Patrick Powell
from LPRng).
- Support for string options and additional operation modes for
foomatic-addpjloptions (Thanks to Patrick Powell from LPRng).
- Additional checks in the configure scripts (Thanks to Patrick
Powell from LPRng).
- Composite options can be nested now (normal and forced composite
options can be mixed).
- Several modifications to make the PPD files compatible with the
PostScript drivers for Windows: 100 instead of 999 choices for the
"Copies" options, no "," and "+" in the "*NickName" and
"*ShortNickName" entries, optional cutting of the long names of the
options and choices (translation strings in the PPDs) to 39
characters for compatibility with the Microsoft PostScript driver
and the original PostScript driver for Windows of CUPS. All this is
not required by the Adobe specification for PPD files.
- Compatibility fixes for IRIX and the *BSD operating systems.
Packages
- --------
The release consists of two packages:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/foomatic-filters-3.0.1rc1.tar.gz
http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/foomatic-db-engine-3.0.1rc1.tar.gz
It is recommended to also update foomatic-db and foomatic-db-hpijs from
the CVS or from http://www.linuxprinting.org/download/foomatic/
The packages should be installed in the following order:
1. foomatic-filters
2. foomatic-db
3. foomatic-db-hpijs
4. foomatic-db-engine
Please read the USAGE files to know how to install and use these
packages. You do not necessarily need to install foomatic-db-hpijs, you
only need it when you want to use a printer with the HPIJS driver.
Uninstall any old version of Foomatic before you install these packages.
To set up print queues for any supported spooler (CUPS, LPRng, LPD,
GNUlpr, PPR, PDQ, CPS, no spooler) use "foomatic-configure" as described
in the USAGE file of foomatic-db-engine. You can set up printer queues
based on the Foomatic database, with PPD files for PostScript printers,
with CUPS raster drivers, or raw queues. This is possible for all
spoolers. You can also print a wide range of file types with every
spooler (when you use LPRng, LPD, GNUlpr, PDQ, CPS, or no spooler you
need "a2ps" on your machine).
If you want to know how all this works, see the README files of both the
foomatic-db-engine and foomatic-filters packages.
Web site
- --------
Alternatively you can download all what you need for setting up a print
queue from the web. Go simply to the usual site:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/