Thank you very much, Zdenek Dohnal, for those details. I hope the GTK folks will find the information helpful and that a reasonable solution, acceptable and satisfactory for all involved parties, will be worked out in the near future.
I don't have the time to investigate the details at this point, but I do hope that a good solution is developed by the relevant community members, for the sake of all the end users who have no clue why such a basic problem has been occurring, and in the hopes that Linux can become a serious and viable option for Enterprise Desktop environments.
Perhaps increased communication, interaction, and/or fellowship between such communities (i.e. the GTK and OpenPrinting teams/communities) could help avert such problems in the future. In the process of trying to deal with this issue, I was surprised to discover how beautiful, seamless, effortless, and elegant the KDE printer settings / network printing experience was (zero effort required; everything works as expected). I wonder if it's worth it for GTK developers to look into how KDE manages to interface with the same exact OpenPrinting project in such a successful way (at least with respect to this issue of network printing and printers).
Issue report at OpenPrinting / CUPS: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/737
Thank you. I opened an issue at CUPS (link below).
Thank you for the suggestion about adding "ImplicitClasses off" to cupsd.conf. I tried it, but it doesn't seem to work. I tried rebooting and deleting the existing printer entries, but the new ones that pop up still use implicitclass. I don't have much time to devote to this after arriving at the initial workaround above, so my hope is that the GTK and CUPS people can look into the issue more, as such basic issues cause Linux on the Enterprise Desktop to continue to be quite problematic.
Here is the post at CUPS: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/737
I originally posted this issue to the GNOME Settings forum, but I think it may be more appropriate here or perhaps needs attention in both places.
Here is the original post: gnome-control-center#2463
I re-opened this issue because the workaround I outlined is not really a proper solution. The issue begs for a definitive solution that would presumably involve identifying the root cause and devising a remedy by GTK+ developers/maintainers, CUPS developers/maintainers, and/or others.
When searching for a solution earlier, I came across a handful of forum posts, scattered over a span of several years, that seemed to describe the same problem, but there was never a solution provided.
Even in our single organization's use-case, the workaround proposed would require a significant amount of manual intervention on many different workstations, each of which uses a range of different printers, depending on location.
Identifying and remedying the root problem seems like it should be a priority, given the problematic nature of this issue related to basic printing and the persistence of this sort of problem over many years, as evidenced by unanswered forum posts and appeals for help by different community members over the past several years.
Hello, just FYI, I re-opened the issue in the GNOME Settings forum, as the issue needs a definitive solution. Perhaps I need to post here in the GTK forum instead or additionally.
I re-opened this issue because the workaround I outlined is not really a proper solution. The issue begs for a definitive solution that would presumably involve identifying the root cause and devising a remedy by GTK+ developers/maintainers, CUPS developers/maintainers, and/or others.
When searching for a solution earlier, I came across a handful of forum posts, scattered over a span of several years, that seemed to describe the same problem, but there was never a solution provided.
Even in our single organization's use-case, the workaround proposed would require a significant amount of manual intervention on many different workstations, each of which uses a range of different printers, depending on location.
Identifying and remedying the root problem seems like it should be a priority, given the problematic nature of this issue related to basic printing and the persistence of this sort of problem over many years, as evidenced by unanswered forum posts and appeals for help by different community members over the past several years.
UPDATE: I have since ascertained that this is a GTK printing issue, after testing in multiple desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, Budgie, and KDE Plasma) and trying to print in different applications. The problem is present in all GTK applications in every desktop environment tested, whereas KDE/Qt applications are completely unaffected. With this added information, does anybody have ideas about how to resolve this issue or know where to post/label so that GTK developers can be alerted to this problem and/or propose a workaround or solution?
I have been testing Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS on multiple computers on our network and have been having a problem printing to network printers using user-specified settings. When I print from an application like Firefox (both apt and snap), LibreWriter, or Evolution, the print dialogs allow me to select options like duplex (double-sided) printing and color-vs-monochrome printing. The actual, physical print process, however, does not respect the options I select in the application print dialog(s) and instead prints according to the system-wide duplex and color options set in the GNOME-control-center Printer settings.
I've tried changing the duplex and color options in the application print dialogs in multiple ways, for example, using the default Firefox print dialog and also the "Print using the system dialog..." option, both of which fail to have any effect on the final printout, which simply follows the System-wide duplex and color settings. I've also tried changing the default values via the CUPS web interface, but it also has no effect (the resultant printouts print according to the system-wide gnome-control-center settings for the selected printer and ignore the settings selected by the user and CUPS defaults without any indication to the user about what is happening).
Printers:
Lexmark XM3150, driverless, cups-filters 1.28.15 (monochrome printer, so only the duplex issue is obviously occurring)
Xerox AltaLink C8170, driverless, cups-filters 1.28.15 (color printer — both duplex and color-mode user application print settings are overridden by the settings in the Gnome Control Center, without any indication to the user that this is happening)
Steps to reproduce:
UPDATE: I have since ascertained that this is a GTK printing issue, after testing in multiple desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, Budgie, and KDE Plasma) and trying to print in different applications. The problem is present in all GTK applications in every desktop environment tested, whereas KDE/Qt applications are completely unaffected. With this added information, does anybody have ideas about how to resolve this issue or know where to post/label so that GTK developers can be alerted to this problem and/or propose a workaround or solution?
I have been testing Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS on multiple computers on our network and have been having a problem printing to network printers using user-specified settings. When I print from an application like Firefox (both apt and snap), LibreWriter, or Evolution, the print dialogs allow me to select options like duplex (double-sided) printing and color-vs-monochrome printing. The actual, physical print process, however, does not respect the options I select in the application print dialog(s) and instead prints according to the system-wide duplex and color options set in the GNOME-control-center Printer settings.
I've tried changing the duplex and color options in the application print dialogs in multiple ways, for example, using the default Firefox print dialog and also the "Print using the system dialog..." option, both of which fail to have any effect on the final printout, which simply follows the System-wide duplex and color settings. I've also tried changing the default values via the CUPS web interface, but it also has no effect (the resultant printouts print according to the system-wide gnome-control-center settings for the selected printer and ignore the settings selected by the user and CUPS defaults without any indication to the user about what is happening).
Printers:
Lexmark XM3150, driverless, cups-filters 1.28.15 (monochrome printer, so only the duplex issue is obviously occurring)
Xerox AltaLink C8170, driverless, cups-filters 1.28.15 (color printer — both duplex and color-mode user application print settings are overridden by the settings in the Gnome Control Center, without any indication to the user that this is happening)
Steps to reproduce:
The printing problem has been resolved with the following workaround (I consider this a workaround, since such arcane steps should not be required to attain the expected behavior that users expect by default):
In the CUPS web administration, modify the target printer (there are multiple discovered entries for each network printer) as follows:
-Select a version of the printer in which the connection does not begin with "implicitclass://"
-Use the official PPD from the printer manufacturer when asked to select a Make/Model from the list (simply supplying the official PPD and doing nothing else does not work— for the Lexmark, it worked in half of the testing, for the Xerox, nothing would print at all)
Here are the current settings that are now working:
Description: Lexmark_XM3150
Driver: Lexmark XM3100 Series (grayscale, 2-sided printing)
Connection: dnssd://Lexmark%20XM3150._ipp._tcp.local/?uuid=46ddad31-ac9a-4001-827e-a73bc92ff831
Description: Xerox_AltaLink_C8170_9F_31_43
Driver: Xerox AltaLink C8170 (color, 2-sided printing)
Connection: ipps://Xerox%20AltaLink%20C8170%20(9F%3A31%3A43)._ipps._tcp.local/
User-specified settings during printing now work as expected in all applications.
Nevermind, Matthias, I was able to resolve the issue. I'll update my original post. -sss
Hello Matthias,
Could you comment on the following related printing issue or perhaps redirect it (the linked post below) to or reclassify it under an appropriate team that would be able to address the issue?
Thank you very much,
sss
I have since ascertained that this appears to be a GTK printing issue, after testing in multiple desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, and KDE Plasma) and trying to print in different applications. The problem is present in all DEs when printing from GTK applications, but KDE/Qt applications are UNAFFECTED. With this added information, does someone have any clue about how to resolve this?
UPDATE: I have since ascertained that this is a GTK printing issue, after testing in multiple desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, Budgie, and KDE Plasma) and trying to print in different applications. The problem is present in all GTK applications in every desktop environment tested, whereas KDE/Qt applications are completely unaffected. With this added information, does anybody have ideas about how to resolve this issue or know where to post/label so that GTK developers can be alerted to this problem and/or propose a workaround or solution?
I have been testing Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS on multiple computers on our network and have been having a problem printing to network printers using user-specified settings. When I print from an application like Firefox (both apt and snap), LibreWriter, or Evolution, the print dialogs allow me to select options like duplex (double-sided) printing and color-vs-monochrome printing. The actual, physical print process, however, does not respect the options I select in the application print dialog(s) and instead prints according to the system-wide duplex and color options set in the GNOME-control-center Printer settings.
I've tried changing the duplex and color options in the application print dialogs in multiple ways, for example, using the default Firefox print dialog and also the "Print using the system dialog..." option, both of which fail to have any effect on the final printout, which simply follows the System-wide duplex and color settings. I've also tried changing the default values via the CUPS web interface, but it also has no effect (the resultant printouts print according to the system-wide gnome-control-center settings for the selected printer and ignore the settings selected by the user and CUPS defaults without any indication to the user about what is happening).
Printers:
Lexmark XM3150, driverless, cups-filters 1.28.15 (monochrome printer, so only the duplex issue is obviously occurring)
Xerox AltaLink C8170, driverless, cups-filters 1.28.15 (color printer — both duplex and color-mode user application print settings are overridden by the settings in the Gnome Control Center, without any indication to the user that this is happening)
Steps to reproduce: