Scribus is fantastic

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Swansword

I just used scribus to lay out a Christmas card on 13x19 paper, to fold twice. It only took me about an hour to do the whole thing. But the printing is really a bummer. I read about it here on the forum. Wouldn't it be pretty easy to just have scribus convert to a PDF and send that directly to the print spooler?

Anyway, excellent job, scribus developers!

GarryP

Welcome to the forum Swansword.

The general recommendation from the most-active users on the forum is not to print directly from Scribus but to export to PDF before printing instead. The PDF is your final proof before you get things printed.

The Print and Print Preview functions of Scribus do have some extra options that might be useful to some people but if these functions can't be trusted then no amount of extra features are going to make people use them. In my opinion, these functions should be removed until they have been proven to work properly (as much as possible) but that would take a lot of testing that would actually cost money - for paper and ink - rather than just time and effort.

I have no idea how easy/difficult your suggestion would be to implement and it would be entirely the developers' decision what to do.

a.l.e

i think it would be rather easy to implemement.


a "simple" way to implement it:

- in the preferences let the user choose
  - between directly printing or one of the supported pdf printers
  - to show the scribus dialog or show the pdf viewer's dialog
- the choice can be changed in the preferences (probably not in the document settings)
- add a dialog for configuring the "print as pdf"
  - which pages
  - scaling
  - colors
  - ...


anybody in this forum can help out by finding out which are the pdf "printers" (mostly, they will be viewers that support an API (the command line) for printing.
and find out if and how they can be controlled through an API / the command line.

as an example:

- mupdf: you cannot print with it

- envince:
  - you cannot directly print from the command line
  - there is "--print-settings %s %f" but i could not find out how to use it

- lpr
  - with cups-pdf, you can print to file with 'lpr -P PDF'
  - "lpstat -p -d" lists the avalaible printers

- adobe reader:
  - i don't have it installed it here
  - according to the internet printing from the command line should be supported  (https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1839765)
  - but it might be against the EULA you have not signed nor read...