Paper offsets and the tools to configure printing.

[James Wilkinson]

Hello, all you happy people.

I've been having problems with my Samsung ML-4500 printer. They're now
fixed, but I feel as though I'm missing the Easy Way To Do It.

I was losing the first couple of lines and the first couple of columns
from each page when I printed plain text (e.g. lp /etc/hosts). I fixed
this by installing kdebase and running kprinter. That allowed me to
increase the margins at the top and to the left of the page, after which
it printed normally.

Now that's quite a lot to download, just to get a printer to work. But I
couldn't find a Gnome utility that would do the same thing. The Gnome
printer utilities didn't expose that functionality.

It looked as though I might have been able to do it from the command
line. And now I've seen what the changes are, I should be able to. But
either it wasn't well documented, or I missed the documentation.

So how would a non-technical user go about sorting this?

I'm planning on Bugzillaing this (after working out the right
bugzillas), but I'd some feedback first.

I understand that the Gnome philosophy is that things should Just Work,
and the distribution should come configured to print properly. I'm not
convinced that this means there shouldn't be an option for playing with
offsets (even if they are configured properly by default: the ability to
print on pre-printed forms is often very useful).  I'm not convinced
that the Open Source community *can* get the offsets right all the time
on all new printers.

Thoughts?

I should say that this printer has worked fine in 32-bit Fedora since
Fedora first came out, and in 64-bit mode for a few weeks. (I'm on
x86-64 Ubuntu).

It's a GDI printer (gets the host CPU to do some of the work) with Open
Source drivers that are integrated into Ubuntu and Fedora.

I was also having problems with the entire computer freezing solid when
I tried to print. A custom-compiled kernel solved that: I'm waiting for
a suitable opportunity to see if I can narrow down what was causing the
problems. In the meantime, that one is bugzilla'd.

Thanks,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | Let He who Taketh the Plunge
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | Remember to Return it by Tuesday.