[Mageia-discuss] Samsung Printer driver and choice of "pdf" "PostScript" in print default

[TJ]

On 06/05/2012 05:08 PM, Marc Paré wrote:
> I was just printing some material in "landscape" mode on my Samsung
> SCX-4200 printer and could not figure out why it would only print in
> "portrait" mode. After fiddling around with settings, I found that when
> at the printing stage, the print window will open and if I went to
> "Print->Properties->Device(tab)->Printer Language Type->" it showed
> "pdf". If I changed it to ""PostScript (Level from driver)" everything
> worked fine.
>
> Is there a way to make the "PostScript" drive the default driver? It
> just seems that whenever I open/close a piece of editing/wordprocessing
> software, the driver goes back to "pdf".
>
> Many thanks for any help.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Marc
>
> Mageia2; Samsung SCX-4200
>
>
I ran into this problem back in February with LibreOffice Calc and my HP 
printers. It was even more bothersome for me with Calc, as if you export 
part of a spreadsheet to pdf, the resulting document won't print 
correctly from any pdf reader where you can't tell it to auto-rotate the 
page, no matter what you do.

Supposedly, if you go to /usr/lib/libreoffice/programs and run the 
spadmin script, you can change this default setting (for the printer, 
not the pdf export). That's the way LibreOffice set it up to work, as I 
understand it. In practice, with Mageia anyway, if the "Disable CUPS 
support" box isn't checked, the setting isn't permanent. But, if you 
disable CUPS support, you'll need to provide your own printer command.

Interestingly enough, the problem didn't exist with the last Sun/Oracle 
version of OpenOffice, so you could circumvent the problem by installing 
and using that instead of LibreOffice. I haven't tried the new Apache 
version of OpenOffice yet, so I don't know if that still holds true.

A workaround for individual files was to change the printer language 
setting for each document, then save the document to make it permanent 
for that document. You might have to make a small, invisible change in 
the document itself, like adding a character and then removing it, to 
trigger a proper save. I know it's a bother if you need to do it for a 
lot of files, but it's all I know to do.

TJ