PDF Printing giving searchable text (ie not using CUPS-PDF!)

[pastim]

I have some reports I would like to print to PDF, rather than paper, so I can carry them around. They are mostly text, and I have to be able to search them for text strings.

Currently it seems that the output of CUPS-PDF is not searchable. I am on Ubuntu 12.04, 64 bit, all latest stable uodates.

The reports I want to produce are from MSAccess 2003 under Wine (currently 1.5.9). CUPS-PDF is available as a printer, but suffers from the problem stated above. I have tried installing several pdf creation programs under Wine, but none seem to work. PDFCreator got closest - I have a clean installation, the program configuration screens work fine, a printer is defined, Windows programs seem to print to it - but I cannot get it to actually produce the files. The error I get when initiating the source program (eg Windows Notepad under Wine) from the command line is:

Code: Select all

  fixme:winspool:ScheduleJob can't schedule to port L"pdfcmon"

Any ideas? I imagine that creating a link under dosdevices might do the trick, but I am not sure what to link to (possibly a ghostscript program, nor whether it would have any effect.

Similar programs give similar errors (eg PDFill Writer and others).

[dimesio]

Any app that uses a printer driver to create PDFs is going to run into http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6416, and the resulting PDF will not be searchable.

[pastim]

Any app that uses a printer driver to create PDFs is going to run into http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6416, and the resulting PDF will not be searchable.

The comments against the bug report about CUPS-PDF producing non-searchable text are true of print out from Linux programs as well, not just Windows running under Wine, so I just wonder whether the problem isn't CUPS rather than Wine.

Other Linux programs, including LibreOffice Writer and Chromium (print to file in pdf format) manage to produce their own PDF output that is searchable.

Is it worth my trying to resolve the port printing error I reported to try it and see? I appreciate that the font problem reported may scupper this, but I'm happy to try.

[dimesio]

The original reporter for bug 6416 didn't use CUPS-PDF: he printed to a ps file, then converted that to PDF.

You can file a bug for the problem with PDF Creator. http://bugs.winehq.org/

Office 2010's builtin save as PDF feature does produce searchable PDFs under Wine.

[pastim]

The original reporter for bug 6416 didn't use CUPS-PDF: he printed to a ps file, then converted that to PDF.
You can file a bug for the problem with PDF Creator. http://bugs.winehq.org/
Office 2010's builtin save as PDF feature does produce searchable PDFs under Wine.

It seems that several of the print-to-PDF solutions suffer from the same problem, resulting in in an error like:

fixme:winspool:ScheduleJob can't schedule to port L"xxx"

where xxx is the port that particular solution uses.

I suspect this is because Wine is set to use the Linux printers, and that trying to add a Windows printer monitor is never going to work. I don't know anything like enough to know whether tinkering with DLLs is likely to work (I had a quick try with spoolss.ddl and localspl.dll as native but that resulted in the printer not being found at all). I don't want to waste people's time with a bug report unless you think it worthwhile. Any views?

Meanwhile your suggestion of saving as PDF set me thinking, and resulted in my finding a different solution. I can export a report from Access 2003 as rtf. That will do for me - it's small, text and searchable. If I really want I want always process it through LibreOffice to get a searchable PDF.

Thanks for the advice.

[dimesio]

If something works in Windows but not in Wine, it's a valid bug. Whether it can or will be fixed is for the developers to decide. Whether it's worth your time to file a bug is something only you can decide.

[pastim]

If something works in Windows but not in Wine, it's a valid bug. Whether it can or will be fixed is for the developers to decide. Whether it's worth your time to file a bug is something only you can decide.

OK - I'll file a bug report and see what the developers say.

[winspool]

If something works in Windows but not in Wine, it's a valid bug. Whether it can or will be fixed is for the developers to decide. Whether it's worth your time to file a bug is something only you can decide.

OK - I'll file a bug report and see what the developers say.

There is already a bug for this issue:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3864
Current Wine ignores Print monitors.
There are other things to do, before we can go furter in that bug.