Re: spadmin, fax machines, etc. is this still useful ?

Le 14/03/2014 11:45, Caolán McNamara a écrit :

Hi Caolan,

Judging from the posts I have seen on the user list since LO came into
existence, there are still some use cases where CUPS does not provide
the required support and people need to be able to fall back to spadmin
for printing.

The fact that spadmin could be used to add Type1 PS fonts, which are no
longer supported, if I understand correctly, has also been, and
continues to be, an issue that crops up on the user list (and possibly
also in BZ) for some people.

The problem as I see it is that there are so many printers out there
being used by LO users, some of them quite old now (yet tried and
trusted, especially in business), for which CUPS support has been
dropped or curbed over time, and it is handy to be able to pop in one's
own PPD to just get the job done.

From my own experience, the switch to "CUPS ONLY" by default caused the
loss of being able to print from two different trays in one document
over the network, i.e. have page 1 print out on header paper in a first
or manual tray, and then subsequent pages from the follow-on paper tray.
This could previously be set up in a PPD and included via spadmin,
including on Mac OSX. I have not yet found a way to this with CUPS,
having been reduced to separate printing steps for each set of pages.

I have no idea whether such use cases are still representative of the
mainstream usage of LO, but it is certainly around in businesses with
legacy printers that are still functioning. I have used HP LJs (4050n,
2500dtn, Apple LaserWriter) in business scenarii in the past with OOo
and the ability to fiddle with the PPD to get things working right was
the saving grace on many occasion.

Alex