On Friday, February 14, 2025 5:08 PM, I wrote:
>> I've completed my U.S. tax forms in the fillable PDFs provided by the
>> Internal Revenue Service. Now I want to print them ...
>>
>> In the past, I was happy printing from Acrobat 9, which is still fine for
>> display purposes. But with my new printer (Brother DCP-L2640DW), printing
>> from Acrobat fails. The request gets to the printer, but localhost:631 shows
>> "Can't detect file type". So I've been happy printing from qpdfview, until
>> now. Now the dollar amounts I entered on the forms look OK in qpdfview's
>> display but print in a very thin font. Any ideas how to fix this?
>>
>> Xpdf prints show a font that is a little too thick, and xpdf offers none of
>> the printer's options (e.g. double-sided printing). I don't try Evince
>> (Gnome) or Okular (KDE) because I run the fvwm window manager.
I should have mentioned that I'm running Bookworm. Thanks for the many
helpful suggestions. I've tried them all, with the following results:
On Friday, February 14, 2025 5:49 PM, John Hasler wrote:
> Evince works for me under FVWM (though I rarely use it).
and on Friday, February 14, 2025 6:41 PM, Bret Busby added:
> I use primarily Evince, runnimg on the MATE desktop environement, and,
> it seems to work okay.
>
> I suggest that you give it a try.
>
> I have found that an application for one Desktop environment, will
> generally work without problems, on another desktop environment, so, KDE
> applications will work equally well on MATE, as will gnome and xfce
> applications.
I installed Evince. Calling it brings up not even a GUI, just two error
messages:
Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified
Cannot parse arguments: Cannot open display:
On Friday, February 14, 2025 9:54 PM, Max Nikulin suggested:
> Have you tried printing PDF files from Firefox or Chromium?
I brought up the IRS pdf in firefox (file:///[pathname] in URL window).
Sending that to the printer gave good fonts. If I "print from system
dialog", I can select double-sided.
On Saturday, February 15, 2025 6:47 AM, Dan Ritter added:
> Unless you are extremely low on disk space, there is no reason
> to think that Evince or Okular will not run on your machine.
I installed Okular (264 packages). That also gave a good print, despite some
error messages.
And on Saturday, February 15, 2025 11:45 AM, David Wright wrote:
> For two-sided portrait, I use:
>
> lp -d brother -o media=letter -o print-quality=5 -o sides=two-sided-long-edge
> "$@"
>
> where brother is the device name.
This also gave the font that's too small.
Along the way, I defined a new printer using the Brother PPD for Linux. (I
hadn't done that because it's a driverless printer and CUPS seemed to have
set up everything OK until I tried the IRS form.) I haven't found that the
choice of driver matters. Qpdfview still gives the thin font with either
driver.
In short, these failed with the IRS form:
old Acrobat 9 ("Can't detect file type")
qpdfview, lp command (OK except for thin font for text I entered)
evince (window permission failure)
and these succeeded:
firefox
okular (albeit with error messages)
Thanks for all of your many helpful suggestions.
________________________________________
From: Greg <curtys...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2025 12:17 PM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: fonts printing too thin from qpdfview
External Email: Use Caution
On 2025-02-15, David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Without a DE, okular is quite a large install. On my bullseye, it
> would require 194 new packages, including switching fuse to fuse3,
> which might affect ntfs-3g and jmtpfs.
> OTOH, I have evince installed from when I set up the machine,
> and 48 extra packages were installed at the step:
> # apt-get -y install arandr evince fvwm fvwm-icons
>
Maybe the OP can increase the DPI in the printer settings.
