[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#670055: cups-filters: Printing a text file fails when Liberation is the only TrueType font available

[Brian Potkin]

On Wed 25 Apr 2012 at 09:23:50 +0200, Fabian Greffrath wrote:

> I still fail to reproduce this. Quite the contrary, I just printed a  
> page with only fonts-liberation and gsfonts-x11 installed; it was "Print 
> to File" from gedit, though, but it still worked fine.

"Print to File" doesn't use cups. It produces a pdf file with embedded
fonts dictated by the application.

> I can imagine two different reasons for the failure on your system:  
> Either you still have a local copy of the liberation fonts installed  
> somewhere, e.g. in ~/.fonts or /usr/local/, and this copy still contains 
> the bug that made Liberation-Mono appear non-monospaced (#567806). Or 
> your fontconfig is confused or doesn't know about the right directory in 
> which the fonts are installed. Could you please try to "rm -rf 
> ~/.fontconfig" and run "fc-cache -s -v" as root?

1. I have now installed Squeeze (base system only) on a spare partition
   of another machine and upgraded it to unstable. fonts-liberation and
   gsfonts-x11 were installed first to satisfy the font dependencies of
   cups-filters and fontconfig-config, followed by cups and all its
   Recommends:.

2. Walking in the footsteps of the cups-filters README:

     cupsctl FileDevice=yes; cupsctl LogLevel=debug

     lpadmin -p test -E -v file:/tmp/printout -P /usr/share/ppd/cupsfilters/Generic-PDF_Printer-PDF.ppd

   The file in /tmp/printout is the one to be sent to the printer.

     lp -d test .bashrc

   The result is the same as I described in my first post - an output
   file which is empty. Substituting the Generic-PostScript PPD file
   from foomatic for the Generic-PDF one (first deleting the test print
   queue) makes no difference.
   
3. fontconfig installed. No change to the previous outcome. Moved
   ~/.fontconfig out of the way and did 'fc-cache -s -vfc-cache -s -v'
   as root.

   /usr/share/fonts: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 4 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/X11: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 3 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1: skipping, existing cache is valid: 35 fonts, 0 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/X11/encodings: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 1 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/X11/encodings/large: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/X11/util: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/cmap: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 1 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/cmap/gs-cjk-resource: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/truetype: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 1 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation: skipping, existing cache is valid: 16 fonts, 0 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/type1: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 1 dirs
   /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts: skipping, existing cache is valid: 35 fonts, 0 dirs
   /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts: skipping, no such directory
   /usr/local/share/fonts: skipping, existing cache is valid: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
   /var/cache/fontconfig: cleaning cache directory
   fc-cache: succeeded

Apologies for the delay in replying but testing a few times took a little
while. My understanding of font behaviour is rudimentary so I'm not very
sure what is going on here. Please let me know if there is anything else
I can do to help.

Regards,

Brian.