printer

[Kerry Hoath]

No you run a2ps pipe that to ghostscript
and tell ghostscript to print to the printer.
Basically printers in Linux are like printers in dos, if your application wants to
print stuff it needs a driver or set of programs to do so.
ghostscript is the most common.
On LInux systems you usually run a print spooler like lpr or lprng
rather than dumping stuff out the port. This way you can print from windows to the
box and also queue up print jobs.
Normally the file is piped to lpr like this:
cat foo.ps|lpr
the spooling system runs a special magic filter to decide what to do with the file
and what filters to run. An example is "the file is postscript
render it to deskjet output" or "This is dvi
run it through dvilj"
You configure this in /etc/printcap.
If you only want to print from a windows box just install lprng
samba and the right drivers under windows and windows can send
raw dj output to the print system which should pass it through
unmodified to the printer.
Windows has a system called uniprint which handles the
device independant nature of windows printing. I hear cups can do this for
Linux but I don't know specifics.
Basically you just hit file print under Windows and the
operating system handles the icky details of format conversion from word to
the control set required by your printer.
Under LInux you do it yourself witha little help from some scripts but normally
you need to know what is going on behind the sceens,
"This printer prints pcl so to get from text to pcl we go text to postscript with a2ps then ps to pcl with ghostscript."
I should read the printing howto sometime see what it says, but I had my printers set up
back in 1993 before that document came out.

Regards, Kerry.
On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 08:00:22PM -0400, Igor Gueths wrote:
> Hi all. Well dug up ghostscript, libjpeg, libpng, and zlib 1.13 and built
> them. I also got hpijs, because the printing howto had mentioned something
> along the lines of that it contained the deskjet driver (s). If I were to
> load the deskjet module
> (s), what would the filenames be? I'll keep looking around but I didn't
> see anything related to deskjet. But once I do this I can just dig up
> something like a2ps and pipe it to lp0 using lpr? Thanks!
> 
> 
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-- 
Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or  kerry at gotss.spice.net.au
ICQ: 8226547 msn: kerry at gotss.net Yahoo: kerryhoath at yahoo.com.au