install CUPS-PDF on SuSE 64-bit

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| By Webner

What is CUPS-PDF

CUPS-PDF acts as a virtual printer but instead of printing hard copies of your files, it prints PDF files as output. It appears as a printer under printer list on your machine, and if you select that you would get a pdf file as output. That means you can use it as a pdf converter utility.

Installation steps on SuSE 64-bit:

1. Download CUPS-PDF software from (in tar.gz format) http://www.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~vrbehr/cups-pdf/download.shtml:

At this time of writing, latest available version is 2.5.0 (cups-pdf_2.5.0.tar.gz)

2. Unzip this in a temp folder:

tar xvfz cups-pdf_2.5.0.tar.gz

3. Goto cups-pdf-2.5.0/src folder and compile CUPS-PDF source:

gcc -O9 -s -o cups-pdf cups-pdf.c

4. Previous step will create executable file cups-pdf in src folder. Copy cups-pdf file to /usr/lib64/cups/backend.

5. Copy extra/cups-pdf.conf to /etc/cups.

6. If you want to use the color PostScript driver that comes with CUPS-PDF, copy extra/CUPS-PDF.ppd to your /usr/share/cups/model/Generic folder.

7. Change ownership and permissions of /usr/lib64/cups/backend/cups-pdf file as follows:

chown root:root /usr/lib64/cups/backend/cups-pdf
chmod 700 /usr/lib64/cups/backend/cups-pdf

8. Restart CUPS service:

rccups restart

9. Now go to admin interface (open browser and access http://localhost:631/) to add cups-pdf printer. Click on ‘Administration’ tab and you should see “CUPS-PDF (Virtual PDF Printer)” available there for setup. Add that as printer:

select ‘Generic’ as Make
Generic CUPS-PDF Printer (en) as Model and click on Add Printer

Printer is added and you can use it now.

Note: By default output pdf files are generated in /var/spool/cups-pdf/${USER} folder. That means if you print a file as root user, output pdf will be stored in /var/spool/cups-pdf/root folder. You can change this location in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf file.

Open /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf.
Uncomment #Out /var/spool/cups-pdf/${USER} if it is commented out.
Change /var/spool/cups-pdf/${USER} to whatever location you want to set it to.

Above steps were followed successfully by me by taking help from guidelines at : http://www.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~vrbehr/cups-pdf/welcome.shtml and thanks to writer of this software Dr. Volker Christian Behr for helping me out with couple of issues I faced during setup.

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