Tuesday, December 9, 2014

GNOME planner page size work-around

It seems GNOME planner has a few bugs that means I can't manage to get a decent export from it. The bugs I am apparently observing include:
 + characters 'fi' are do not appear in the export to PDF.
 + specify printing to a page size that is not about Letter size.

The work-around is to:

1. Install cups-pdf driver.
2. Modify /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf to hi-jack the in intermediatory Postscript and redirect it to a file. By default the postscript is converted to pdf, which then misses the 'fi' characters.

/etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf must contain:
 

### Key: GhostScript
##  location of GhostScript binary (gs)
##  MacOSX: for using pstopdf (recommended) set this to /usr/bin/pstopdf
##          or its proper location on your system

GhostScript /usr/bin/echo

### Key: GSCall
## command line for calling GhostScript (!!! DO NOT USE NEWLINES !!!)
## MacOSX: for using pstopdf set this to %s %s -o %s %s

GSCall %s %s; cat > %s < %s

With these configurated values, after selecting the 'cups-pdf' printer, I end up with a postscript file in /home/rhenwood/Desktop probably called something like 'Planner_job__2.pdf' or something.

The file is a postscript file, to load it into inkscape for editing, you'll need to rename it '.ps'.