Monday 30 July 2007

A little problem of GIMP printing and Kubuntu

Usually printing with GIMP is a no-brainer. Once you've installed Gimp-Print, you're ready to go.

On Kubuntu 7.'04 I found a tiny bug that can make things quite difficult. It happens that GIMP cannot find your printer -even if you correctly configure CUPS and Gimp-Print from the GIMP-Print gui. When you try to print using the default setting of "(Default printer)" you'll get the following error: "lp: Error - no standard target available".

For some reason, GIMP doesn't understand which printer is the default printer. What you have to do is:

- Setup your model of printer etc. on GIMP-Print correctly
- Have a look in /etc/cups/ppd and look for the .ppd files. There should be one corresponding to the name you gave the printer(s) when you installed. For example, I have a single file named HP_Laserjet_1300.ppd. Remember that filename.
- In the GIMP-Print dialogue, look for "Setup printer..." and click. Another dialogue will open. Now check the "Custom command" button and write the following line:

lp -s -d name_of_your_printer -oraw

and substitute name_of_your_printer with the filename you found before, without the .ppd extension. So if your filename is "myprinter.ppd" the line will be "lp -s -d myprinter -oraw".

Click "OK". Now you should be able to print. Try to see if you can save the settings -it seems it did it, but somehow after a reboot I had to do this again from scratch. Let me know.

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