PDF Printing in Xubuntu using CUPS

Printing to PDF in Windows is a royal pain at best.

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to install the cups-pdf printer on Xubuntu.

First thing is to install the cups-pdf printer (it’s in the universe repository)

sudo apt-get cups-pdf

Next thing is to set the permissions of the cups-pdf printer to set user id. This allows the person/process that executes the file to have access to system resources, as if they were the owner of the file (which in this case is root).

sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf

The next part comes from the Xubuntu documentation section on printing…

First you need to open the User and Groups interface from the System menu, and add the user cupsys to the group shadow. Once done you can restart the cupsys daemon

sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Then open an internet browser to http://localhost:631/admin. You’ll need to enter in your username and sudo password. From there you can click the Administration tab, and you should be able to see the PDF-Printer, ready to be added.

Firstly the ‘make/manufacturer’ of the printer must be set: generic. Then you can move on to choose the ‘model/driver’ for the printer: Generic Postscript Printer Foomatic/Postscript.

(After reading the CUPS Documentation it seems that there is a .ppd file you can use to install a colour postscript printer, but the Generic one seems to be working fine at the moment).

So finally, you should have the printer displayed in the web browser, and be able to print from applications.