It has annoyed me for some time that when I print pages from Firefox on Gentoo my default printer settings were not recognised. However I didn’t spend any time trying to solve the “problem” because it was just an annoyance.

But recently I added a HP Color LaserJet to my office network and found that printing from Firefox not only didn’t recognise that this was my default printer, it didn’t print in color, even though the default configuration for the printer was to print in color.

Then I discovered bubbl.us, a hosted application which builds nicely colored mind maps. This on-line application (you can see my mini-review here) not only printed to whatever Firefox decided was my default printer (not my LaserJet!), but did not allow me to select the printer at all.

So I had to find out how to solve the issue.

It turns out that Firefox uses the printer, and printer options, set with lpoptions.

So, to get Firefox to print to a specific printer, with specific settings, is simply a matter of opening a console and issuing the appropriate lpoptions commands. Thus, these few steps has Firefox doing just what I want it to do…

nigelb@angus ~ $  lpoptions -d ColorLaser
nigelb@angus ~ $  lpoptions -p ColorLaser -o ColorMode=Color

Obviously, you will use your own printer name, and the options appropriate to your printer model, but this tip should get you headed in the right direction if you have had issues with printing from Firefox.

This information is specifically related to Gentoo (perhaps also to the KDE Desktop), but may also be relevant to other distributions. Feel free to leave a comment if this works for you, or if you can add more information.