Flutterby™! : Linux - It just keeps getting better. 2005-12-27 02:00:34.272036+00

Linux - It just keeps getting better.

2005-12-27 02:00:34.272036+00 by meuon 2 comments

It used to be rocket science getting oddball printers to work in Linux. LinuxPrinting.org deserves a hug for having a print driver (.ppd file) for an odd Kyocera-Mita network printer/copier/fax that had me printing to it via CUPS in minutes. And suprise: It prints .pdf formatted files extremely well. Useful for printing out attractive reports, invoices, etc.. fpdf.org makes creating pdf's easy, and now the Linux/LAMP system can print them directly as well.

Yeah, especially after my recent struggles in trying to get Windows XP to output some reasonably good photographs, I'm totally blown away by the CUPS folks. I've even installed new machines and done the "oh, man, I have to copy files over from a working Linux

box and change things and...", and then used the standard way to configure the printer and discovered that it's actually faster and easier to do things through the GUI. How weird is that?

This is yet another area in which Linux

has just completely blown by Windows

while we weren't looking.

Aaand, if you know that your images are all of the same orientation, rather than going through the cool (but always interactive) Gnome Photo Printer, a quick and dirty hack to print four up is:

montage -geometry +4+4 img1.jpg img2.jpg img3.jpg img4.jpg temp.jpg

lp -o scaling=100 temp.jpg

Gnome Photo Printer is smart enough to deal with rotated images and images of different resolutions, but sometimes I know everything came off the same camera, hasn't been touched, and I just want to dump a directory to the printer.