Bugzilla – Bug 97628
Please add a "Printer" selection
Last modified: 2007-06-05 14:17:45 UTC
Would be great to have a selection "Printer" in the pacakge selection of Yast, for easier selection (and checking, if all personal selection is satisfied) of the all the "spreaded" printing tools, etc. Please add these packages: > [ OpenOffice_org ? ] a2ps cups cups-drivers cups-drivers-stp cupsddk dvips enscript foomatic-filters filter filters ghostscript-* gnome-print gnome-cups-manager gtklp gv hplip manufacturer-PPDs pbm2l7k psutils xpp yudit (für uniprint) cedilla clisp scribus [...all fonts...] Thanks in advance.
adapted priority
Waiting for good reasons for such a new selection ...
Stefan, which kind of "good reasons" are you interested in? The reason I know is: When the user installs all what is in the "printing" selection, then he has all the tools and all the fonts to print "anything". At the moment the printing system provides only some reasonable generic printing support (but for example no CJK printing), see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=58903 As there is no printing selection, a normal user has no chance to know which additional packages are of interest to print "anything". I added Mike to Cc because he is the only person in the known universe who knows more about "all fonts" ;-) Mike, which (non-bitmap) font packages do you suggest to be installed to print "anything" (in particular to print CJK, cyrillic, arabic, ...). Disk space doesn't matter here because those fonts are not installed by default. The intention is to make users with the usual 100GB disks happy by simply installing "all".
I forgot to actually add Mike to the Cc field.
Thanks! Currently the easiest way to get display and print support for CJK is to install the complete "Fonts" selection, which contains simply all fonts on our distribution. Any proposal for the name of this new selection? Andreas, Martin. Any comments?
Johannes> which (non-bitmap) font packages do you suggest to be Johannes> installed to print "anything" (in particular to print CJK, Johannes> cyrillic, arabic, ...). Disk space doesn't matter here Johannes> because those fonts are not installed by default. The Johannes> intention is to make users with the usual 100GB disks happy Johannes> by simply installing "all". In that case they can install the complete font selection as Stefan suggested. Installing a "minimal" set of fonts to print "anything" is a bit difficult because most fonts are in packages which are collections of many fonts. For example, there is a package "fonts-arabic" which contains many fonts for Arabic, many of them fancy, decorative fonts not for general use. Only one font of this package would be enough as a minimal default to be able to print and display Arabic. It's the same with most other font packages, most of them are collections of fonts. If you have special interest in that language, you probably want them all. But if you only want to make sure that you don't see any boxes on the screen and when printing, often one font is enough. To be able to install such a minimal set of fonts, we would need to split up font packages into many sub-packages. This looks like quite a lot of hassle. Just installing *all* fonts is of course far easier. For another idea to solve the problem, see bug #93910. There we discussed that it would be nice to have one font which contains "almost everything" like "Bitstream Cyberbit", "Arial Unicode MS", or "CODE2000". Installing one of them would be enough already to print practically Johannes> everything. As written in bug #93910, I contacted both Bitstream and Agfa already and asked for conditions to license such fonts but I didn't receive any reply. But see also comment #16 in bug #93910. Maybe the shareware font CODE2000 is a reasonably good alternative. Version 1.15 of CODE2000 covers more of Unicode in a single font than any other font I currently know and supports many exotic languages no other font does. Although very ugly for Japanese and Chinese, it is readable and would be a reasonable fallback. But as it is a shareware font, we would need to negotiate with the author to be able to distribute it.
That printer selection still contains stuff that I might not want to have on my system. And it gives the wrong impression that printing will only work if the whole selection is installed. This is better handled by Patterns and that's something the YaST team is working on. So, no changes for 10.0 - but let's see how this looks in 10.1...
agreed.
Adjusted priority.
Hmm... if it is just a matter of the right name, how about naming the selection "printing tools" or "print aiding stuff"? Maybe someone else is having a even better name for it? :-)
I don't think this is still an issue, right? Otherwise feel free to reopen and discuss with Adrian/aj.