Up front, sincere congratulations to all developers and other contributors. With R1/beta4 Haiku is very close to being a useful daily driver. Smoothly running the 64 bit version here on quite modern real PC hardware. The native Web browser WebPositive has come along in leaps and bounds. While not perfect it’s quite usable now and having Gnome Web as well appears to plug some unsupported holes.
The problem I’ve now encountered with using Haiku on a daily basis is the lack of cohesive printing.
While the Gutenprint driver support is great. And I have successfully setup my printer. The problem is that an important number of software applications do not appear to be able to use the Haiku printers.
In the case of WebPositive there seems to be no print functionality at all. While in other applications the printers are simply missing. I’ve read that this is due to missing printer support in the Haiku’s Qt API layer(?). So my problem may be specific to applications written in Qt. But this appears to be most of the apps that I’m trying to run. LibreOffice and Gnome Web being two places where printing would be highly desireable.
My questions then are general in nature. Is there already an open support ticket to resolve the Qt API printing issue? And if so is it being actively worked on?
The tracker for 3rd party apps and libs is at Haikuports on GitHub. Gnome Web is using fresh port of Gtk and wayland, it may take some time.
On Haiku, LibreOffice is built with Qt. qthaikuplugins is responsible for configuration and interfacing with Haiku, at least for Qt5, so there also things reported here.
Lot of the work on porting Qt and Gtk is made by @3dEyes, so I’m sure that he would appreciate some help.
I have the latest Haiku - beta 5 and the latest LibreOffice. I have a couple of PS3 and PCL6 xerox laser printers on the network and I can sent them a test print from the printer setup but the only printer that shows up on the LibreOffice is “print to file”. The BePDF reader shows no printer either. They say “No default printer”. Needless to say I have a default printer set.
Very impressed with the LibreOffice - it makes Haiku very useful. If the connection could be made with the Haiku printing system then it would be complete.
Thanks for all the very good work.
The PCL5 and the PCL6 should work! Not sure about network support and how to get it work!
EDIT: First, try to use the Haiku PCL5-compatible driver implementation. The Haiku PCL6-compatible driver implementation is also available as an option.
