5.11. Printing in Wine

How to print documents in Wine...

5.11.1. Printing

Written by Huw D M Davies

(Extracted from wine/documentation/printing)

Printing in Wine can be done in one of two ways:

  1. Use the built-in Wine PostScript driver (+ ghostscript to produce output for non-PostScript printers).

  2. Use an external windows 3.1 printer driver (outdated, probably won't get supported any more).

Note that at the moment WinPrinters (cheap, dumb printers that require the host computer to explicitly control the head) will not work with their Windows printer drivers. It is unclear whether they ever will.

5.11.2. The Wine PostScript Driver

Written by Huw D M Davies

(Extracted from wine/documentation/psdriver)

This allows Wine to generate PostScript files without needing an external printer driver. Wine in this case uses the system provided PostScript printer filters, which almost all use ghostscript if necessary. Those should be configured during the original system installation or by your system administrator.

5.11.2.1. Installation

5.11.2.1.4. Required configuration for all printer types

You won't need Adobe Font Metric (AFM) files for the (type 1 PostScript) fonts that you wish to use any more. Wine now has this information built-in.

You'll need a PPD file for your printer. This describes certain characteristics of the printer such as which fonts are installed, how to select manual feed etc. Adobe has many of these on its website, have a look in ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/printerdrivers/win/all/. See above for information on configuring the driver to use this file.

To enable colour printing you need to have the *ColorDevice entry in the PPD set to true, otherwise the driver will generate greyscale.

Note that you need not set printer=on in the [wine] section of the wine config file, this enables printing via external printer drivers and does not affect the built-in PostScript driver.

If you're lucky you should now be able to produce PS files from Wine!

I've tested it with win3.1 notepad/write, Winword6 and Origin4.0 and 32 bit apps such as win98 wordpad, Winword97, Powerpoint2000 with some degree of success - you should be able to get something out, it may not be in the right place.