Firefox (other GTK3 apps?) sends PDF to PostScript printer

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%consolidated.net@localhost>]

I finally bit the bullet and built a "modern" Firefox (88.x from pkgsrc-
2021Q2) since some critical websites stopped functioning with firefox52.

The print dialog only offers Print to PDF, but down at the bottom there
is "Print using the system print dialog..." which brought up the familiar
print dialog I was used to.

The result of "Print to LPR", however, spewed PDF to my printer, not
the PostScript it speaks (it is a Real Printer(tm) which lives on my
LAN).  Thus it emptied its paper trays printing a few lines of gibberish
on the top and/or bottom of each page.

A quick search seems to indicate that GTK3, like QT5, has removed LPR/LPD
print support and with it, PostScript output generation.  It seems that
one MUST install "that piece of crap that breaks printing completely"
(CUPS) to translate PDF back to PostScript and be yet another intermediate
interface between an application and LPR.

That is, if one wishes to print directly from such applications.  The
other workaround is to print/save/export/etc. to PDF and use an external
application to read the file and send Postscript to the printer (xpdf,
gv, etc.).


Okay, since I always install "print/a2ps", I changed the print command
in the "system print dialog" from "lpr" to "a2ps" and it seems to do
the right thing.  The annoying part is that this seems to not be persistent
(or is not managed by Firefox), so I have to put it in every time.
Likewise with the paper size--even though Firefox lets "US Letter"
(na_letter) persist, the "system print dialog" always defaults to A4
and if I don't change it to "US Letter" EVERY TIME, the print job is
ignored.

I guess these are GTK-managed settings but I don't use a GTK-enabled
GUI so I'll have to figure out how to manually set these things.


What have been other's experiences with this?  Tips, tricks, suggestions?

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