rants


Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

Printing still a nightmare

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

It’s been a while since I posted a real rant here. Well, this morning I had a good (well … bad) inspiration.  I had a meeting with a long time partner of FSFE to discuss new projects to finance and I wanted to present them the SELF Project.  I thought that printing the slides and carrying them with me would help me make the point: SELF is a very cool project and it is important to contribute to it also in Italy and in Italian.

The printer refused to cooperate.  HP PSC1210, fully free drivers, supported by CUPS.  I open the presentation on OO.org and try to print the outline but either OO.org sucks or something else sucks: I could only print the first page.  OO.org help system was of no help.

I thought of exporting to pdf the presentation and print that instead of using OO.org.  Opened the pdf in Evince, print… guess what?  GNOME printing sucks too:  no matter if I tell the printing panel to print two pages on one sheet of paper, the setting is ignored. Also there seemed to be no way to set the orientation of the paper. I seldom use the printer, but WTH! Things should just work, man. I’m using latest Ubuntu right now, and I am not sure they are the ones to blame.