These are some guidelines for chosing and configuring printing software for GNU/Linux in RULE.
Don’t assume ONLY old hardware
We do have to support old printers. Let’s not forget, however, that an obsolete computer may very well have attached a state of the art printer. A small business may use the money saved on RAM to print and send out full colour, high resolution, highly professional invoices, for example. Let’s not forget it.
Print server
Can we take advantage of this project and say that, at least within its scope, lpd is due for retirement? Why don’t we choose, at least for the single desktop, one of pdq, or maybe cups?
Tex/latex
No, thank you. People who want them, and have enough disk space, will just install it from standard RPMs. We should worry about Tex/Latex only to check that:
- we don’t prevent their later installation, of course
- we don’t install anything depending from them. like muttprint, for example
Miscellanea
We must provide, and integrate, the following capabilities:
- ASCII/HTML to Postscript translation, from the file manager and the command line
- Two sided printing, or printing multiple pages per sheet
- Print in filofax format
- print code with syntax highlighted, even in color
- Print email as postscript, with nice header formatting