pdf print does not work by default

the ps-file which i couldn't transform to pdf

screenshot with the error-message

I can confirm, this is a very annoying bug.

This is still an issue for me almost two full months later. Confirming..

pdf printing should work if the package cups-pdf is installed.

However this package needs the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf to say RunAsUser No instead of the default RunAsUser Yes.
Unsetting the RunAsUser option is unvise, because it increases security risks by running the cups scheduler as user root.

Could this be fixed so that the cups-pdf package would work as user cupsys and then making this package part of the ubuntu-desktop package so it would be installed by default? It would also be nice to add a default printer to the system that uses this backend, so it would be ready to go without any extra effort from the user.

=) Mikko

More info from my previous message: http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/print-to-pdf-using-cups-pdf/

When following the above instructions it was possible to add the printer to Breezy and the test page printed just fine to my home folder. But QCad for example doesn't even show the printer in it's list of printers, and the print to file dialog only has .ps -files as supported filetypes. Printing from OpenOffice works fine, though.

In Dapper Beta I wasn't even able to add the printer to the system! The System->Administration->Printing tool did not recognize the virtual pdf-printer at all.

Sorry for the sidetrack there. Now I see what you meant (should have looked at the screenshot straight away ;-)

With only the standard tools installed (I think it's one of those ghostscript tools, maybe from gs-esp package), you can call ps2pdf from the terminal and it gets the conversion done just fine.

With this functionality built-in I really don't understand why the graphical version called by gnome-printer doesn't work.

Thanks for your comments Mikko,
I guess the desired solution to the described problem should be in line with your first post: Printing to a .pdf should work for every program which uses the gnome-printing-backend by default. I just described the user-case of printing a .ps file to a .pdf file - since this is something which can be done from the console without a problem but doesn't work from the gnome-print dialogue.

I tried ps2pdf when I initially commented on this bug, but it did not work - the resulting pdfs were always corrupted, something to do with dealing with images I think. Looks like it's working now, so that's good.

But, the GNOME printing dialog allows me to print in Gedit to a PDF file directly. But that same dialog doesn't let me print to PDF in Epiphany (same thing as reported above in Evince). It would be good to have this work everywhere, or be removed until such a time as it works properly. Dapper is under a month away, so something should be done quickly.

If the bug can't be fixed easily, I vote to simply remove it, if this is possible. Leave in the default print to Postscript though, as that seems to work everywhere. I'd rather see Dapper ship without an option, rather than an option that is broken in about half of the instances where it appears it would be useful.

I haven't tried ps2pdf with prints containing raster images, so I can't say for sure if it is working correctly with all files. In my case there was only a cad image (basically just lines with different widths).

Mikko