Tips and tricks: How can I configure Firefox to use the KDE print system?
by the editorial team
Firefox has built-in configuration variables to deal with external printing commands. Per default, it uses the UNIX lpr command to send print jobs to the printer. This setting can be overridden by the user by doing the following:
- In the Firefox location bar, enter about:config
- Once the list of configuration values is shown, right-click on an item in the list and choose New->String
- In the first box, Firefox asks for the preference name. Enter print.printer_PostScript/default.print_command (upper- and lowercase are important!), and click OK
- In the second box, enter kprinter as the default print command.
Whenever Firefox prints, choose the printer named "PostScript/default". The output will be handled by the KDE printing system, allowing advanced features like creating PDF files and faxing.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:37 am
I’ve also seen some people suggest to use “kprinter –stdin” instead for non-KDE applications. In my experience, both “kprinter” and “kprinter –stdin” seem to work equally well. Any idea which command would be preferable?
November 27th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Ha!,
I’ve currently a 80% completed draft for blog posting sitting on my harddisk waiting for completion with exactly the same topic (will be a bit more detailled).
Laika,
the “–stdin” addition was required by an early version of kprinter (remember, that KDE utility is around since 2001, with mostly all of its current feature set). Later, autodiscovery of input via stdin was added. Support for an explicitely named ‘–stdin’ parameter was kept for backward compatibility.
There is not any difference between the two for recent versions of KDE. (But don’t ask me when exactly the auto-detection of stdin input was added….).
November 28th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Ok, very useful thxs!!, and now what about e making Firefox using the default files explorer (instead of the annoying Nautilus)?
I’m actually discovering that Konqueror is far superior to Firefox and I can’t wait to have Konqueror using Webkit to finally get rid of Firefox.
December 3rd, 2007 at 7:30 am
MORE BAD ADVICE FROM REDHAT:
OK, I just wasted about 30 minutes of my day trying to switch from the worthless Gnome print dialog to the useful KDE print dialog (on the current REDHAT EL5 Firefox 1.5).
The above instructions are worthless, and I found at least 4 print.*.command variables. I switched all of them to kprinter, but it doesn’t work. Typical broken REDHAT Linux.
I even found a variable “print.print.printer”. Now, that’s funny, and it makes me wonder what kind of incompetent programmers work for Mozilla. REDHAT EL5 is a mess.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Thanks, it’s very helpfull, I have been finding for this for long time.
Just for some second’s, now I can get kprinter option to print from Firefox, … just very easy to create PDF files.
Previously I need to create ps file before use ps2pdf to converted it.
Anyway Thank you so much
GBU
Samuel