X11 Office Apps and printing

[s3raphim]

I'm running Apple X11, Fink, and a host of Unix stuff on my G3 iBook, and I have some questions about (drumroll) printing from office programs.

I have OpenOffice installed, and in its print dialog box it recognizes my Lexmark printer. However, when I go to print, the job - according to the Moc OSX Print Center - gets stopped for some reason. Any thoughts on extra stuff that needs to be set up? The CUPS stuff from Open Office installed just fine....

The other OpenOffice-related question I had was about formatting. I know reverse engineering isn't perfect, etc, etc, but I was wondering if anyone else has had any problems with *.rtf? Things I save as rtf lose tabs and/or can't be opened at all by other prog's like abiword.

Which brings me to abiWord. While I need OpenOffice for spreadsheet stuff, this little app works fine for word processing, and it opens a lot more quickly. My question: how does it talk to my printer? How do I get my X11 apps to find my USB printer in general? Having to print from TextEdit in OSX is annoying when I'm doing the writing elsewhere...

Any and all advice much appreciated. Thanks.

 

[scruffy]

CUPS listens on localhost port 631. So, perhaps you could try to get the programs to send print jobs to a printer server, and then just use localhost as the 'remote' server, @ 631.

If I understand right, the job from OO shows up in the print manager, then gets stopped. I assume you can print from other programs fine? I know it's not the most elegant way, but have you tried printing to a file (which would give you a .ps file), and then printing that postscript file from e.g. Preview? If that doesn't work either, it might be the files that OO is producing call on the printer to do more than it can do; if it does work then you can at least rule that out.