help with printing

[Michael Small]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 04:35:50PM -0400, Michael Small wrote:
...
> Maybe you need ghostscript to make something your printer understands
> even when printing text?  I don't remember everything I did to get
> mine working (it's also a kind of HP ink jet) but I know at the
> time it involved getting a newer version of ghostscript, perhaps
> hpijs, and using the foomatic-rip script from cups.  I definitely
> needed to use ghostscript to print everything.  I think foomatic-rip
> looks after making that happen.  And I've used a2ps or enscript to
> go from text to postscript (which ghostscript converts to whatever
> the printer takes).  This is what my printcap looks like.
> 
> 
> #	$OpenBSD: printcap,v 1.4 2003/03/28 21:32:30 jmc Exp $
> 
> #lp|local line printer:\
> #	:lp=/dev/lp:sd=/var/spool/output:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:
> 
> # HP C5100 with ethernet interface
> # trying the foomatic-rip way without cups or apsfilter.
> # note: foomatic can't deal with a gzipped ppd.
> lp|HP C5100, filter:\
> 	:lp=9100 at 192.168.2.3:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:\
> 	:sd=/var/spool/output:\
> 	:af=/usr/local/share/ppd/HP/HP-PhotoSmart_C5100-hpijs.ppd:\
> 	:if=/usr/local/bin/foomatic-rip:\
> 	:pl=68:\
> 	:mx#0:sh:

One other piece to this was that foomatic-rip (which is just this huge
Perl script btw) reads /etc/foomatic/filter.conf.  To have enscript be
used, I have this in that file:

textfilter: enscript -2 -r -j -G --margins=::20:33 -o -
debug: 0


When I used a2ps, it looked like this:

textfilter: a2ps -2 -r -A fill -o -
debug: 0


I should really look and see if it supports other kinds of filters.  Every
time I forget and try to print something other than text or ps I get a big
mess.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at panix.com