[X2go-Dev] Printing-related question for Windows X2go client users

John A. Sullivan III jsullivan at opensourcedevel.com
Sat Dec 10 16:49:01 CET 2011


On Sat, 2011-12-10 at 14:36 +0100, Stefan Baur (newsgroups-Kontakt)
wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> this question goes out to all the Windows users of the X2go-Client:
> 
> Has anybody ever tried to use "Sumatra PDF" as a PDF endpoint on the 
> Windows client, instead of Adobe Reader?
> 
> It seems rather interesting, as it is GNU licensed, offers commandline 
> options to print a file to the default printer (or show a print dialog) 
> and auto-terminate itself after printing has finished (look for 
> "Command-line arguments" in the online manual linked below).
> 
> Info in English:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatra_PDF
> http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/manual.html
> 
> Info in German:
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatra_PDF
> http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/manual-de.html
> 
> I'd love to try it out myself, but I haven't managed to get 
> printing/showing a PDF on the Client to work at all so far, thus testing 
> Sumatra PDF doesn't really make sense on my client yet.
> 
> So here's to crowdsourcing - anybody ever tried it, anybody with a 
> working client printer setup willing to try?
<snip>
It looks very interesting and we'd be interested in trying it.  However,
PDFs have been a real sore spot in our VDI work and our offering both
Linux and Windows desktops for those who would like to leave the Windows
world for any of several reasons.  Not only is there nothing even close
to Acrobat for editing PDFs in the open source world, the readers also
have serious shortcomings.

Believe me, I am no Adobe fan and wish things were different.  One of
our clients is a construction company who handle very large numbers of
very large PDFs - their construction drawings.  Last we tested, there
were serious bugs in every single non-Adobe PDF reader on Linux which
refused to properly print the larger drawings.  They always shrunk them
to the default paper size.

Moreover and more to the point at hand, none of the open source PDF
readers were able to support all the features we frequently encountered
among these and other documents.  If the reader only handles 85% of
documents and has trouble printing, one is required to keep the Acrobat
Reader around.  Most of our users would prefer to not deal with two
applications.  I suspect that Sumatra, being lightweight by design, will
fall into the same category.

Not that Acrobat Reader is not without problems.  Besides its bloat, the
Linux reader has hard coded the permissions of set files to 644 wreaking
havoc on our shared directories where everything is setgid with a 770
umask so that shared documents can be edited by the group.

So, the point of it all is that I suspect there will be problems using
Sumatra - John




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