Printing in Wine
How to print documents in Wine...
Printing
Written by &name-huw-davies; &email-huw-davies;
(Extracted from wine/documentation/printing)
Printing in Wine can be done in one of two ways. Both of which are pretty alpha.
Use an external windows 3.1 printer driver.
Use the builtin Wine Postscript driver (+ ghostscript to produce
output for non-postscript printers).
Note that at the moment WinPrinters (cheap, dumb printers that require
the host computer to explicitly control the head) will not work with
their Windows printer drivers. It is unclear whether they ever will.
External printer drivers
At present only 16 bit drivers will work (note that these include win9x
drivers). To use them, add
printer=on
to the [wine] section of wine.conf (or
~/.wine/config). This lets
CreateDC proceed if its driver argument is a 16
bit driver. You will probably also need to add
"TTEnable" = "0" "TTOnly" = "0"
to the [TrueType] section of ~/.wine/config. The code for
the driver interface is in graphics/win16drv.
Builtin Wine PostScript driver
Enables printing of PostScript files via a driver built into Wine. See
below for installation instructions. The code for the PostScript
driver is in graphics/psdrv.
Spooling
Spooling is rather primitive. The [spooler] section of
wine.conf maps a port (e.g.
LPT1:) to a file or a command via a pipe. For
example the following lines
"LPT1:" = "foo.ps" "LPT2:" = "|lpr"
map LPT1: to file foo.ps
and LPT2: to the lpr
command. If a job is sent to an unlisted port then a file is created
with that port's name e.g. for LPT3: a file
called LPT3: would be created.
The Wine PostScript Driver
Written by &name-huw-davies; &email-huw-davies;
(Extracted from wine/documentation/psdriver)
When complete this will allow Wine to generate PostScript files without
needing an external printer driver. It should be possible to print to a
non PostScript printer by filtering the output through ghostscript.
Installation
The driver behaves as if it were a DRV file called
wineps.drv which at the moment is built into Wine.
Although it mimics a 16 bit driver it will work with both 16 and 32 bit
apps, just as win9x drivers do.
To install it add
"Wine PostScript Driver" = "WINEPS,LPT1:"
to the [devices] section and
"Wine PostScript Driver" = "WINEPS,LPT1:,15,45"
to the [PrinterPorts] section of win.ini and to set it
as the default printer also add
"device" = "Wine PostScript Driver,WINEPS,LPT1:"
to the [windows] section of ~/.wine/config and ???
[sic]
You also need to add certain entries to the registry. The easiest way
to do this is to customise the contents of
documentation/psdrv.reg (see below) and use the
Winelib program programs/regapi/regapi. For
example, if you have installed the Wine source tree in
/usr/src/wine, you could use the following
series of commands:
cp /usr/src/wine/documentation/psdrv.reg ~
vi ~/psdrv.reg
Edit the copy of psdrv.reg to suit your
requirements. At a minimum, you must specify a PPD file for
each printer.
regapi setValue < ~/psdrv.reg
You will need Adobe Font Metric (AFM) files for the (type 1 PostScript)
fonts that you wish to use. You can get these from
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/type/win/all/afmfiles . The
directories base17 or base35
are good places to start. Note that these are only the font metrics and
not the fonts themselves. At the moment the driver does not download
additional fonts, so you can only use fonts that are already present on
the printer. (Actually, the driver can use any font that is listed in
the PPD file, for which it has an AFM file. If you use fonts that are
not installed in your printer, or in
Ghostscript, you will need to use some means of embedding the font in
the print job or downloading the font to the printer. Note also that
the driver does not yet properly list required fonts in its DSC
comments, so a print manager that depends on these comments to
download the proper fonts to the printer may not work properly.)
Then create a [afmdirs] section in your
wine.conf (or
~/.wine/config) and add a line of the form
"dir<n>" = "/unix/path/name/"
for each directory that contains AFM files you wish to use.
You also require a PPD file for your printer. This describes certain
characteristics of the printer such as which fonts are installed, how
to select manual feed etc. Adobe also has many of these on its website,
have a look in
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/printerdrivers/win/all/. See
above for information on configuring the driver to use this file.
To enable colour printing you need to have the
*ColorDevice entry in the PPD set to
true, otherwise the driver will generate
greyscale.
Note that you need not set printer=on in
the [wine] section of wine.conf, this
enables printing via external printer drivers and does not
affect the builtin PostScript driver.
If you're lucky you should now be able to produce PS files
from Wine!
I've tested it with win3.1 notepad/write, Winword6 and
Origin4.0 and 32 bit apps such as win98 wordpad, Winword97,
Powerpoint2000 with some degree of success - you should be
able to get something out, it may not be in the right place.
TODO / Bugs
Driver does read PPD files, but ignores all constraints
and doesn't let you specify whether you have optional
extras such as envelope feeders. You will therefore find
a larger than normal selection of input bins in the
print setup dialog box. I've only really tested ppd
parsing on the hp4m6_v1.ppd file.
No TrueType download.
StretchDIBits uses level 2 PostScript.
AdvancedSetup dialog box.
Many partially implemented functions.
ps.c is becoming messy.
Notepad often starts text too far to the left depending
on the margin settings. However the win3.1
pscript.drv (under wine) also does
this.
Probably many more...
Please contact me if you want to help so that we can avoid duplication.
&name-huw-davies; &email-huw-davies;