Low print quality of Abiword (gnome-print)

[Gérard Milmeister]

I just printed something with Abiword for the first time. The result is
pretty unusable. Letter spacing is completely wrong. I made a pdf
version of the output available at
http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/staff/milmei/output.pdf. This is exactly what
appears on a printed page. The font used is Vera Serif. However results
are similar, if I use other high-quality fonts (Adobe, Bitstream, etc).
This seems to be a problem with gnome-print since the same problem
occurs with Gnumeric.
A possible hint could be the following warnings:
** (AbiWord-2.2:9683): WARNING **: failed request with status 403

** (AbiWord-2.2:9683): WARNING **: failed request with status 403
GnomePrintCupsPlugin-Message: The ppd file for the CUPS printer Epson
could not be loaded.
GnomePrintCupsPlugin-Message: The ppd file for the CUPS printer LaserJet
could not be loaded.

Cups works perfectly well, the output from OpenOffice is good as
expected.
-- 
Gérard Milmeister
Langackerstrasse 49
CH-8057 Zürich