Printing on Haiku

Printing documents on Haiku can be necessary sometimes.

However there's not so much documentation on how to do the printer's setup and how to print from applications.

Here is a quick guide on how to do so.

The printer used as a showcase for this article is a Canon Inkjet which will be connected via USB to my NUC Intel where Haiku OS is installed.

Initial setup

First you need to plug the printer via an USB cable to your Haiku machine.

Turn on the printer.

Then launch the Printers preference application :

Click on the "Add" button to add a printer :

Enter the name of the print you would like to display on your system, then select "Printer type>Gutenprint" and then "Connected to>USB Port".

If everything is working fine, the name and model of your printer should be recognized automatically.

In my case it's correct : Canon MP495 series

The next screen will ask you to give the brand name and the model name.

I don't know why it can't be deduced from the previous step, so I have to indicate manually "Canon>Canon PIXMA MP495" :

Validate with "Ok". Then confirm to have it as the default printer :

Now the new printer should appear in the list of printers :

Select it and click on "Print test page" :

Then click on "Paper setup" :

Select "A4" format and validate with "OK" :

If everything is working fine, you should see the below "Print status" displayed :

And the below test page should be printed on a paper (in color if your printer can, and not in black & white as below) :

How to print in LibreOffice

Instead of only printing a test page, I've decided to go into the LibreOffice application and try to print a page produced by the "LibreOffice Writer" application.

Launch LibreOffice, and then "File> New> Templates" :

Take one of the template, like "Modern business letter" below :

If you try the "Print" menu directly in LibreOffice Writer maybe it will not work out of the box.

Below is a workaround on how to do.

In the File menu select "Export As> Export as PDF" :

Validate the various options by clicking "Export" :

Enter the name of the PDF document to be printed later :

Now open the document with the default BePDF application.

Then select "File> Print" :

You should have the below page setup displayed :

Click on the Paper setup and validate.

You should have the choice on the Color (Color or Black & White) but also on the pages to print :

There might be a bug in the "Print all Pages" because it was not working for me.

In order to avoid that issue, select "Print selected Pages" and indicate "From 1 to 2" even if there's only one page.

Validate with "OK".

You should see the below print status window :

The overview of the page to print is as below :

And it's working fine ! The below page was successfully printed from Haiku :

The support on Haiku for printing is today limited.

However with a few workarounds, you should success in that mission :)