Printer UnPICTifier 1.0

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have wiped out the contents of the /var/spool/cups folder in order to get printing restored, you need to recreate the /var/spool/cups/tmp folder and give it the proper privileges as follows:

• sudo mkdir /var/spool/cups/tmp
• sudo chown daemon:admin /var/spool/cups/tmp
• sudo chmod 1700 /var/spool/cups/tmp

This procedure will be handled by the installer in the next release.

Disclaimer:
Since this software replaces the IPP backend that ships with Jaguar (the original is saved with a ".orig" extension so that the software can be uninstalled), it should only be installed if you have non-OS X print servers and you are attempting to print to them from an OS X machine using Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). It should work just as well as the original for OS X servers, but I make no guarantees.

Description:
This is a little hack I threw together out of annoyance. It addresses a problem with certain Carbon apps and a custom print filter in Jaguar's CUPS distribution (Panther corrects this problem). Specifically, certain Carbon apps, including Adobe Acrobat Reader, produce print jobs in a PICT-encoded Postscript format. On OS X machines, the custom pictwpstops filter converts the job to straight Postscript before the normal CUPS filters get ahold of it.

Because of the way CUPS works, that conversion is done on the server side for remote (shared) printers. As long as the server is running OS X, the job is accepted and prints. However, if the server does not run OS X, e.g. a Linux server, it doesn't know what to do with a PICT-encoded Postscript file, so it just rejects the request. On the OS X side, Print Center repeatedly attempts to send the job to the server without success. This causes the job to hang up in the local queue but, because the printer is remote, the job is not cancelable.

This software fixes that problem by pre-filtering PICT-encoded Postscript into straight Postscript (which is a format recognized by all IPP print servers) using Apple's custom filter before sending the print job to the server.