gobo20@lycos.com wrote:
> finally got my old dec wide-carriage impact printer fixed and am now
> trying to get it to work with slack 10.2 cups. i get the stair-step
> problem since auto crlf is turned off on the printer (it also gets
> printed to from a vms box.) my quick-and-dirty fix is to pipe each job
> through a sed script to add the crlf. it seems like there should be a
> better way to do this and not have to use all the
> ppd/a2ps/foomatic/blah-blah stuff cups seems to need. this is text
> only printing. has anyone else done this and found a better way?
>
>
> thanks.
CUPS is a vast improvement over nothing at all, but printing is
probably the area where Linux is weakest vis-a-vis Windows. It has a
long way to go. The current situation seems to be that maybe half the
time or somewhat more, CUPS works smoothly and painlessly. The other
half, or somewhat less than half the time, you find yourself up to your
neck in dubious design (e.g. Postscript. Why aren't we at least seeing
discussion of alternatives?), wildly uneven and often baffling
documentation, and just plain wierd stuff.
What I can tell you is that there seem to be two ways in CUPS to print
through a filter and get the resulting file into the spooler. First,
It would appear that one could construct a custom filter script that
replaces the normal CUPS filter with a normal CUPS filter followed by a
correction script to correct the errors/priblems. Probably one can,
but CUPS and Linux printing design in general don't make it easy. I've
got one about half written to deal with CUPS inability to generate a
proper PCL header for -- of all things -- an HP-IIP which is probably
the simplest and most basic of all the PCL printers. I put it aside to
deal with more pressing problems. I'll get back to it someday because
not being able to print from Linux is a PITA.
The other choice which is, I think, what you want, is to route all the
print filtering for text through a custom filter. Check this URL and
see if it helps
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Using_You...rint_with_CUPS.
(I hope that I got that right, I had to manually copy it from the
Windows machine).
Good Luck.