HOWTO: Install Cups-PDF

[techstop]

Just found this HOWTO, works great, cheers!

[NewbieLearnLinux]

Sorry to ask but why do we need to install this Cups-PDF ?

[froggay]

cups-pdf is only necessary if you want to print to a pdf file

in my case i have sun an hp boxes ( cad station ) and i don't want to install a pdf printer on each box.

So i have installed a pdf printer on the linux box with cups and cups-lpd so that i can directly send task to this spooler from all the cad workstation.

it was working fine with ubuntu 4.1, and now i'm trying to migrate to 6.06 on a sparc machine (without gnome)

[yopnono]

Sorry to ask but why do we need to install this Cups-PDF ?

The deb I provided is for people that just like to install the cups-pdf and have it working directly without having to sett permission and stuff.

It does the same as installing from synaptic and setting the permission yourself

[techstop]

A more general response is that cups-pdf lets you print from an application to a pdf file rather than a physical printer.

[mssever]

Thanks for the HOWTO. I have a couple of questions, though:

First, why on earth does this backend have to be setuid root? None of the other backends are, so it must be poorly-designed software--especially as most *nix programs go out of their way to avoid setuid root.

How come the deb doesn't set the proper permissions? The whole point of a package is to set everything up automatically. I shouldn't have to read a HOWTO.

[yopnono]

Thanks for the HOWTO. I have a couple of questions, though:

First, why on earth does this backend have to be setuid root? None of the other backends are, so it must be poorly-designed software--especially as most *nix programs go out of their way to avoid setuid root.

How come the deb doesn't set the proper permissions? The whole point of a package is to set everything up automatically. I shouldn't have to read a HOWTO.

I think it's on ubuntu you need to set user id.
If you read the makers website you don't need to do that, but on ubuntu yes... don't know why. You don't need to do that on Fedora 5

http://www.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~vrbehr/cups-pdf/

[NewbieLearnLinux]

A more general response is that cups-pdf lets you print from an application to a pdf file rather than a physical printer.

Thanks for answering. I thought OpenOffice.org could export doccuments to PDF files ...

[techstop]

Thanks for answering. I thought OpenOffice.org could export doccuments to PDF files ...

It sure does, but other applications don't have that feature, therefore the need for cups-pdf.

[NewbieLearnLinux]

I had used PDFCreator on ******* but I rarely used it after I installed OOo-win. Nevertheless this HowTo is a nice one ...