State of Java printing on Mac

[Tres Finocchiaro]

I hope this message is well received.

Over the past year, I've been trying to leverage Java as a cross-platform
desktop printing solution.  My success has varied.  Below are some items
that have caused hiccups or hard-fails specifically to the Mac OS...

   - PDFBOX just released a major update "2.0". Unfortunately the majority
   of PDFs out there seem to crash JVM out completely on Mac.

   - Upstream bug reports:

      https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8042693
      https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8038142

      - Downstream bug report:
      https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-2682

      - El Capitan... We're getting several emails a week stating the
   printers simply won't list when calling
   PrintServiceLookup.lookupPrintServices.

   - No one knows how to reproduce the bug, so we don't have exact steps to
      recreate
      - When it happens, none or only a few printers will list
      - The ever-so-harsh "Reset Printing System" seems to fix it, but this
      is a drastic measure if the client has a lot of configured devices
      - Is anyone else having inconsistent results with
      lookupPrintServices? CUPS command line seems to be OK.

      - CUPS offers some useful information, such as default DPI, but why
   don't we implement them?

   - PrintService.getDefaultAttributeValue(PrinterResolution.class) returns
      null always (Linux too BTW)
      - Where there's a will, there's a way...
      https://github.com/qzind/tray/issues/2#issuecomment-199827794



A bit off topic, but when PDFBOX crashes the JVM, the stack trace message
says to file a bug at a location that doesn't accept bug reports (
http://java.net/jira/browse/MACOSX_PORT), so where's best to file these
things? (I filled out the Oracle bug form, but it took a while to find and
now I'm not sure where the submission went or if its even worth mentioning
since it's clearly a duplicate).

Best regards,

-Tres

- Tres.Finocchiaro at gmail.com