What software do y'all use to read and print PDFs? I'm about at the end of my rope.
Document Viewer: Doesn't read/print all elements of the document, despite their being visible in other programs
LibreOffice Draw: Generates artifacts and random black boxes if the PDF wasn't created by the same program
Atril: Doesn't read/print all elements of the document
MasterPDF: Requires $80 to print without a watermark
Browsers: Either don't read/print all elements or don't print double-sided
And the list goes on.
Are there any PDF readers for linux that just work? What advice might y'all have for me in this area?
Personally I only use the best out there, Okular.
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I did try Okular, and had the issue of some elements not rendering/printing. This is confusing, as I thought PDFs were simple image files.
What exactly are these elements/artifacts that are problematic? Do you have an example PDF that you can share for us to take a look at?
That depends on how you want to define "works". PDF is an open standard and any viewer that adheres to that standard will work fine on any platform.
The problem here is with how people kept demanding this document format to do things it wasn't supposed to do. This lead to the very predictable situation where each viewer/reader/editor now implements those extra features separately, causing compatibility issues. Unless, that is, everyone uses the exact same software.
Ironic, given how PDF was created with the explicit purpose of being a portable document format.
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I have a title with a drop-shadow, and the shadow will render, but not the title. There are section headers that fail to render as well. I can upload the most recent PDF export.
This file was made by Scribus, if that helps at all.
"Works" for me is simply doing what it says on the package. If there's an option to print, I'd like it to print. If the function is to read PDF docs, then it would be nice for it to do so... I'm not picky for advanced functions, I just like them to work if they are included. I understand that software is finicky these days - I even have paid commercial programs that don't do the thing that they just pushed an update to make it do, and now other things are broken as well.
No problem for me. This is a scanned image of my Canon TS-8151 output:
I think you may need to check the raster setting in PDF Options:
Either that or you printer may not support it?
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Well, the box was unchecked so I checked it. I got a blank page with "UNIR" in the upper left corner. Maybe I should contact support for my printer and see what they have to say about drivers. They have a downloadable linux driver, but it's a zipped package of every conceivable driver for every conceivable linux set-up, and I'm lost. Everything has worked out of the box until now.
What is rasterization?
Well, what printer do you have?
Just to add, I printed on thin paper and the ink had not dried, hence the 'ripples' in the red area.
This one is a Toshiba e-STUDIO 2525AC. One of the big office-variety printers.
Thank you all for taking a look into this with me, by the way. I appreciate it.
Hi, I would advise you install gutenprint via the terminal:
sudo apt install gutenprint
Then in a browser enter:
This should launch the CUPS interface.
Choose Manage Printer, then Add Printer and then choose Toshiba and see if your model comes up in the list and choose that one. It might not have the exact model, it might just list 2500c.
My Canon TS-8151 is identified as TS8000 Series.
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Do you have any errors in formatting while previewing the output document? I unfortunately don't have a printer to test this on, but as far as visualizing the document goes I don't see anything out of place. Even when I "print" onto another file (although funny enough it shaves about ~300Kb on the file size, despite looking the same).
If you have that option, I would definitely reach out for support on this. Printers are always a pain to setup and/or troubleshoot... I looked at their drivers available and is not exactly clear how to install them, either. The only manual with instructions I found is this, but seem a bit dated (minimum requirements are Ubuntu 14.04 which is 10 years old at this time).
However, you can still try to install them yourself in case there's any luck, as these steps can be undone easily if there are any issues:
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Download the drivers from the product page, and extract the contents:
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Navigate to that extracted folder into Color_Unix_Linux -> LinuxFilter -> Usa. Once there, right-click anywhere on the file manager and open a new terminal:
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Run the command as shown below, to extract the contents of that archive (
.tarfiles are roughly the same as.zipfor Linux) onto their respective locations:sudo tar -xvf linux.tar --absolute-names
I'm not sure if there are any additional configurations steps needed, but you can restart and give it another try with this.
To undo these steps, you just need to delete the files that were created. You can do this manually through the file manager, or run these commands, one at the time, in the terminal (I suggest copy/paste as you don't want to make typos when deleting files):
EDIT: Actually, before deleting anything make sure that there aren't any other files created by you or some other admin during a previous setup.
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Thank you! I'll take a look at that.
There are issues rendering the PDF in some cases, such as missing text, fields, objects, etc. This varies between PDF readers. I haven't seen any additional errors after this point in the workflow.
I'll take a look at CUPS and make sure that the printer is set up properly (this might fix the double-sided print issue), and then I'll reach out for support to the company if I can't get any improvement through the install steps - they do look different from what I was trying before.
Thank you!