# Cups again...



## koshamo (Feb 27, 2019)

Hi all.

I am working with cups on my system, as I hadn't managed to use lp-system to work with libreoffice.

Everything worked fine until I did a portmaster -a back in September or October. Since then printing does not work anymore and I had some looks into it, but without a solution. I don't need printing very often, so I always moved it to a later time... ;-) But now pain comes up again.

Back then I had a 11.1-RELEASE system, cups working just fine. I did a ports update and the problems came. Now i am running 12.0-RELEASE, the problems still exist and I have no glue where to look, as I didn't change anything except doing an update on the ports. UPDATING says nothing about a significant change for cups within the last 2 years. I again and again checked the configuration, but everything looks fine.

using /usr/bin/lpr prints some blank pages, using /usr/local/bin/lpr prints exactly nothing. cups' error-log tells me no error, cups' access-log tells me "Print-Job successful-ok"

Any hint? I'd support config files, if I'd installed it from ground up. If something special is of interest I'll supply that.

Thanks in advance
Jochen


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## gpw928 (Mar 17, 2019)

Hi,

It looks like you have been bitten by the CUPS take-over off the traditional Berkeley lpr/lpd.

Examine your path.  Look for the location of lpr.   

The Berkeley lpr lives in /usr/bin/lpr.

The CUPS usurper lives in /usr/local/bin/lpr.

I expect that the quick fix is to put /usr/local/bin first in your PATH.


Cheers,


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## linux->bsd (Mar 17, 2019)

I blame Apple:


> In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[6]



I like how they buried this bit:


> Performance and architectural issues forced us to drop CUPS browsing before Avahi was fully supported/deployed.


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## shepper (Mar 18, 2019)

Three comments.

1.  GTK3 removed printing support for lpr printing.  If you do not mind long, hard drive swapping builds, you can build FreeBSD's libreoffice port with gtk2.

2.  In Linux the syntax was changed to start the cups daemon and srobb indicates that this happened in FreeBSD
Srobb cups gotchas



> In the most recent versions of cups, the enable and disable commands are actually called cupsenable and cupsdisable. To enable ACCTHP I could use, instead of the example above
> 
> 
> cupsenable ACCTHP
> ...



3,  For lpr printing without rebuilding libreoffice, you can export as a pdf and use an older app like print/gv to display and print to lpr.  There are also two tools pdf2ps(1) and pdftops(1) that will convert the libreoffice pdf to ps for command line printing.  IMHO pdftops produces better US letter documents.


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