Openoffice is bloated and resource hogging. But occasionally it needs to be used to open files that people send you.

And then you need to print them out.

The problem is that, on my computer, the printer that openoffice always defaults to is something called 'Postscript/Default'. This sends raw postscript to the parallel printer port. This is not what I want, because my Brother HL-1250 doesn't know what to do with postscript. What I want is to be able to choose one of the printers that I set up yonks ago in /etc/printcap, for which the postscript is appropriately dealt with by a filter.

I tried adding a printer by using openoffice's 'spadmin' utility. But the whole thing seems a bit weird to me what with it not even trying to read options from /etc/printcap. Instead, it seems to be setting up an entirely parallel printing system.

Besides that when adding a driver, there wasn't one for my printer.

The solution was to get around openoffice's limitations by adding a "pseudo-printer" as described here

This involves getting openoffice to turn the document into a PDF file that is then piped to kprinter, KDE's print manager. Unlike openoffice's Mickey Mouse way of printing, kprinter properly reads /etc/printcap and allows you to choose any printer configured in /etc/printcap.

The disadvantage is that you end up with an additional dialogue box. Nonetheless I consider it to be a bearable solution.