On my debian lenny box, printing via CUPS works fine, e.g. using OpenOffice.
When printing from Adobe Reader, however, stuff doesn't work. It appears the problem happens during the first step of the process, when Adobe Reader talks to lpr. I guess this is the reason because I get an error message from Adobe Reader like:
The following error occurred while printing...
'usage: lpr [-cdfghlmnpqrstv] [-#num] [-1234 font] [-C class] [-i [numcols]] [-J job] [-Pprinter] [-T title] [-U user] [-wnum] [name ...]'
Looks like lpr complains about the way Adobe Reader talks to it, doesn't it?
This happens no matter if I print to my laser or to CUPS-PDF. It seems like Adobe Reader sends a command like
lpr -P CUPS-PDF -o PageSizeA4 -o blah -o blah
In this particular installation of debian, the Adobe Reader (acroread package) obviously assumes a newer lpr than the one that's installed and sends options to lpr using -o.
Newer versions of lpr may use [ -o option[=value] ]; my older version does not allow using -o according to its manpage.
Some additional investigation with aptitude shows that lpr is marked as installed. man lpr
tells me that this lpr is the BSD printing spooler. On another box where I do not have this problem, lpr is not installed as an individual package. However, I can call lpr from the command line and man lpr
shows a valid manpage telling me I have an lpr version provided by Apple. Where did this lpr authored by Apple come from? What package do I need to install in order to use this particular version of lpr?