Have tried to paper over a pretty bad ceiling lots of cracks and such, it is the spare bedroom and we have a fairly limited budget, it was painted previously with what seemed to be some sort of water proof paint. the paint itself came away quite easily whilst we were scraping the walls (we used a steamer). The ceiling seemed quite bad so after cleaning all the paint off, we sugar soaped the ceiling and then also sized using some watered down wallpaper paste. Went in this morning to find the light weight lining paper which had been well pasted with extra strong solvite had come away. The question is can we use some sort of treatment on the ceiling to seal it thereby allowing us to paper it? 
