Re: Another gnumeric printing problem

[Adrian Custer <acuster gmail com>]

Dear Mr. Feustel,

Best of luck meeting your deadlines and completing your work. I
recognize your frustration at struggling against software to get your
work done.

Please understand that your emails make it difficult for others to help
you both in solving your problem and in trying to fix any problems which
may exist in gnumeric and its associated software. You are not working
systematically enough through your problems to solve them.

Please also let's stop using the "buggy" "broken" and other accusatory
language. I can imagine you are totally frustrated since I've been there
myself but blaming the software is simply not going to help. In my
personal experience 90% of the time what's wrong is my configuration not
gnumeric or anything else. It's also rude and pissing me off personally
so let's move on.

***************************************************

Okay, so let's try to isolate the issues:

The printing stack:
  Printing on unix operating systems has always been quite sophisticated
and therefore complex. To go from a gnumeric sheet to a printed page,
many different systems are interacting. For us to figure out what pieces
are behaving incorrectly we've got to figure out the pieces.

Gnumeric crashing on overwrite of a pdf file:
  The codes are committed to the idea that Gnumeric should never crash
and indeed it's gotten quite stable over the years. If it is we want to
know about it. Most likely your particular combination of gnumeric and
libraries are conflicting in some way. You need to figure out what
versions of gnumeric and associated libraries (like libgnomeprint) you
have installed. 

The different dialogs:
  Gnumeric and gnomeprint have changed a lot over the years, and has
used dialogs from lots of different places. Without a sense of what you
are looking at it's hard to imagine your configuration and what problems
you could be facing.

Garbled print output:
  It sounds like you are using CUPS but you may have some other printing
system. If you have CUPS, the easiest way to interact with it is thorugh
the web at http://yourhost:631 for example http://localhost:631 see 'man
lp' for details.

No time, no time:
  I realize you are under pressure. In this case you've go to decide
what you need to address now and what you can work around. For the stuff
you need to address, you need to take the fifteen minutes it's going to
require to write up your configuration and try to come up with a
coherent statement of what you are trying to do, and what's happening.
In other words, when you are most pressed for time, and are facing a
real obstacle, you still have to write up a bug report perhaps only to
yourself, to trouble shoot your way out of things. 

Best of luck in getting your work done,

ciao,
adrian