Printing from Opera

[Polytropon]

I'm currently trying to get my printing subsystem working again.
Luckily I can use a networked office-class printer that does
understand PS; it's a HP Laserjet 4000 duplex (networked, has
parallel, no USB).

On installing Opera, I encountered the following dialog:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                     Options for opera 11.50                        |
| +----------------------------------------------------------------+ |
| | [X] CUPS   Enable support for printing (requires CUPS)         | | <===
| | [X] VIDEO  Enable support for HTML5 video (requires GStreamer) | |
| | [ ] GTK    Use GTK backend                                     | |
| | [ ] KDE4   Use KDE4 backend                                    | |
+-+----------------------------------------------------------------+-+
|                       [  OK  ]       Cancel                        |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

What does this mean? Do I read that correctly? In order to
print from Opera, you _need_ to use CUPS? Oh come on! Honestly!
In the past it was possible to print without that stuff!
Really... "modern" software seems to get worse and worse...

But back on topic.

Because of the printer I use, I do not have any _need_ for
printer filters (like apsfilter or gs), and surely I do not
need a system that mimics the strange "Windows" ways of
handling the printer.

I did not install CUPS, and therefore the Opera printing
dialog did not show any printer to use. Not even the
system's standard printer (handled by lpr and printcap)
was listed. I can use it from everywhere - except from
Opera.

So I took some time to install CUPS and all the parts
that come with it (Gutenprint, foomatic, hpijs, hplip,
all the stuff I don't even know what it is). Configuring
took some time, but now it prints from Gimp, from the
command line, from gv, from xpdf - just as it should be
(and as it was without CUPS before).

But not from Opera.

Sometimes a job is listed in the lpq output, sometimes
not. But nothing is received by the printer. And even
if I defined "Laserjet" to be CUPS's default printer,
Opera's default is "Laserjet-nodup" (same configuration,
just with duplexer disabled).

For further testing today, I had to re-install the
printer in CUPS again because the settings didn't
survive a reboot. Oh wow...



My question to the list now:

Did anybody get Opera working with CUPS or (better)
without it? Maybe did I miss something important at
installation time?



A first idea for a workaround:

Opera can print to a file. This is the default PS output.
What about creating a file that can be put into the "Print
to file" dialog, but this file is not a file, it somehow
transfers the data written to it to the system's lpr
standard input, just as if you would do "ls | lpr"?
I have "named pipe" in mind, but I'm almost sure that
is _not_ what I need.

Does anyone have some pointers what I should read to
get that working, if possible? Or am I thinking into
the wrong direction?



Installed stuff:

	opera-11.50
	opera-linuxplugins-11.50
	cups-1.4.6
	cups-base-1.4.6_5
	cups-client-1.4.6
	cups-image-1.4.6
	cups-pstoraster-8.15.4_6
	gutenprint-cups-5.2.4_2

As I said, printing worked from everywhere - at least
yesterday it did. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...