[Printing-architecture] ANNOUNCE: Foomatic 4.0.6 released!

[Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter@gmail.com>]

Foomatic 4.0.6 is released and now available for download [1].

This release fixes several bugs which got reported to us in the past 4 
months.

foomatic-rip does not only have several potential crashes fixed but now 
also the automatic input data format recognition (PDF or PostScript) 
works when the input data is preceded by PJL and for non-CUPS use the 
text filter setting of the config file is only used if the selected text 
filter is actually supported.

In foomatic-db-engine the foomatic-ppd-to-xml script to generate printer 
XML entries from PPDs is much more flexible now. It allows personal 
comments for the XML entry, suppressing automatic adding of drivers 
based on supported page description languages, and generating an XML 
entry also for more than one PPD file (for the same printer).

All XML files generated by foomatic-db-engine now have the same 
formatting (spaces, indentations, order of drivers in driver list) as it 
is used by the OpenPrinting web server. This way unnecessary automatic 
commits to the BZR repository with only white space changes are avoided.

The DB.pm Perl module handles failures of the C helper programs 
gracefully now.

The PPD file generator foomatic-ppdfile (or 
/usr/lib/cups/driver/foomatic) now handles driver names with dashes 
(like "hpijs-pcl5e") correctly.

Already for a longer time it was possible to use some special entities 
in the code pieces to build the renderer command line. These entities 
get replaced by job parameters, like the job ID, the user who sent the 
job, the job title, date, number of copies, ... when a job is rendered 
by foomatic-rip. This release now adds documentation for this feature in 
the README file of foomatic-db-engine and it improves the feature by 
adding the possibility to limit the length of the strings to be inserted 
for the entities. This is very helpful for printers which use such 
parameters but abort the job or even crash if the strings are too long.

Thanks to everyone who reported bugs to us (or to their distributions) 
or sent feature requests.

Have a lot of fun with the new Foomatic release!

    Till


[1]https://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/database/foomatic