Chapter 7. Printing with SUSE Linux

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Printing: An Overview

• Common Unix Printing System (CUPS)

• Configuring Printers with YaST

• Configuring CUPS and Network Printers with KDEPrint

• Printing with CUPS

• Working with the Portable Document Format (PDF)

• Console Print Control

• Avoiding Printing Problems

Until relatively recently, printing in Linux has been something of a chore. As the hardware got cheaper, the proprietary drivers got more specialized and more valuable to their vendors. Open-source drivers for the most popular inkjet printers were hard to come by, and different distributions did printing differently, even though the protocol they used was the same. This situation has changed dramatically since the advent of the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), a protocol that simplified things greatly.

Today, SUSE Linux supports hundreds of printers to one degree or another, and YaST makes it easy to set up, test, and configure your printer. In this chapter you will walk through a printer setup, learn to manage multiple printers on your system, and use the command line to print documents directly.

You will also learn a little about PostScript, the primary UNIX/Linux printing language, and its cousin, the Portable Document Format (PDF). Linux has always had applications that read PDF files, and Adobe has occasionally released Linux versions of Acrobat Reader. Several Linux applications (chief among them OpenOffice.org) now support making PDF documents as well.