Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 3:26 am Post subject: Printing fails in german locale
Hi,
I'm using Neooffice 2.2.3 patch 2 on Mac OS X 10.5.2. Printing is via CUPS to a Kyocera FS-800 connected to a linux box and it works ok from all applications - with the notable exception of Neooffice.
Usually the Mac is running in a German locale (i.e. the decimal separator is ","). When I try to print any document from Neooffice in this situation, I see error messages like this in the CUPS error log:
When I change the locale setting of the Mac (via System Settings/International) to English and make sure that the decimal separator is "." (point!), printing from Neooffice works ok.
A similar bug existed years ago in Staroffice. I suppose that the printf statement(s) used to generate the PDF code in Neooffice do not set the locale to "C" so that in a German locale all floating point numbers are generated with a "," as decimal separator instead of ".".
The workaround for me is to select "print to PDF" from the standard Mac print dialog and then print the PDF file from "Preview" - that works ok. However, printing from Neooffice directly should be possible too - I think.
Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 9:01 am Post subject: Re: Printing fails in german locale
chrillek wrote:
When I change the locale setting of the Mac (via System Settings/International) to English and make sure that the decimal separator is "." (point!), printing from Neooffice works ok.
A similar bug existed years ago in Staroffice. I suppose that the printf statement(s) used to generate the PDF code in Neooffice do not set the locale to "C" so that in a German locale all floating point numbers are generated with a "," as decimal separator instead of ".".
This is very odd. However, since we do not use printf or any other hacky methods to print (we use the standard Cocoa drawing APIs to draw to a Cocoa print view) and there are no locale functions for Cocoa's NSViews or its subclasses, the C API functions that you mention are not applicable to printing. It would seem odd that Mac OS X's Cocoa drawing APIs are sensitive to the C locale setting. Most likely, your print driver is the cause of this problem.
Since printing to a PDF file and printing to Preview work for you, can try setting up a new printer in the System Preferences application's Print and FAX icon? When you setup the printer this way instead of going directly through CUPS, does the problem still occur?
Here is some more background on why I think your print driver is the problem:
When printing to PDF or Preview, there is no difference in our code and we use the same exact code for all print operations. In all cases, the Mac OS X Cocoa drawing functions will convert the drawing instructions to PDF and put the PDF file on disk. The only difference when printing to a printer is that that PDF file on disk is streamed to your printer driver which, in this case, is CUPS.
I understand that this problem only happens with NeoOffice. However, that does not eliminate the print driver as the cause. What it probably points out is that NeoOffice does some drawing operations that other applications rarely do. The most common drawing operation that NeoOffice does is glyph scaling so I suspect that the glyph scaling PDF tags that Mac OS X puts in the PDF are not being handled properly by your driver.
If setting up the printer through the System Preferences application's Print and Fax icon does not change anything, I have some more data that may help.
I put a printf in my code that prints the output of the setlocale( LC_ALL, NULL ) function. When the preferred language is set to either English or German in the system preferences application, this function always returns the following:
Since the setlocale() output is constant with different languages, we can eliminate that as the cause.
Nevertheless, I have one more thing that you can try: disable German in the list of NeoOffice languages. To do this, use the following steps:
1. Quit NeoOffice
2. Control-click on the NeoOffice application icon in your /Applications folder and in the popup menu that appears, select the Get Info menu
3. In the dialog that appears, expand the Languages section and uncheck the "de" entry.
4. Restart NeoOffice
If doing the above makes the problem stop, then reenable the "de" entry and find your print driver's installation directory. Within that directory, search for any German.lproj or de.lproj folders. Move any that you find to disable German support for your print driver. Restart NeoOffice and try printing.
Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 8:21 am Post subject: Fixed
Sorry for being so long with that. I followed the first advice and added a printer through the Print&Fax dialogue (had to use the "advanced" options in order to be able to print through http to the CUPS server). Anyway, it works ok now.
Weird, since Neooffice (and OpenOffice 3 Beta as well, fwiw) are the only applications where I experienced this problem.
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