Hi all.
I have a very old address book application (Win95 vintage?). My wife has been
using it for a long time to manage her contacts list.
She likes it because it is designed to print pages formatted for her
filofax-type organizer -- she has some pre-perforated stationary which gives
four organizer pages per A4 sheet, and the application is designed to print
directly onto this paper.
We've had the software installed under Wine for about two years, and at
first it worked beautifully.
However the last time she tried to print with it, she found she couldn't.
The application simply reports "The selected operation is not supported on
this printer". Which is odd, because it's not trying to do anything
even remotely unusual.
The message appears to be generated within the application; no Wine errors are
produced on the console.
She doesn't need to print very often so a lot has changed since it last
printed successfully. Ubuntu has gone from 7.10 to 9.04; Wine has gone from 1.0
to 1.1.29.
Downgrading her Ubuntu isn't an option, but I have tried downgrading Wine
(down as far as 1.1.13) without any success. And I've tried it on several
other PCs with varying combinations of OS and Wine versions, always with the
same results.
I even get the same error message if I try printing to a PDF.
My guess is that the app is checking the printer settings via a Windows API
call, and is not getting the response it expects.
Something has clearly changed somewhere along the line. It might be that Wine is
reporting printer details slightly differently to how it used to? Or possibly
something in Linux has changed? I'm not getting any debug messages, so
it's hard to tell.
If you need to know, the application in question was provided by Succes, a
company that makes the Organizer and stationary that my wife uses. But they no
longer support the software.
Any assistance to help me get the app working again would be greatly
appreciated.
I'm sure the Wine folk here will want to find out what's going on and
work out how to fix it, which would be great. But I'm pragmatic; I'm
quite willing to consider alternatives. So if anyone can suggest an alternative
(free) app that will print to the required format, please let me know. (I've
also tried searching for an OpenOffice template for the stationary, but
haven't found anything suitable)