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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.

On 2006-07-16, gobo20@lycos.com <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?

Unless you have a printer output filter Linux and other
Unix-like operating systems will just send data straight to the
printer and a printer that doesn't start a new line when it
receives a newline character will exhibit the stairstep effect.
You want to read the Printing-HOWTO to learn how to set up a
printer filter with the print spooler you are using.

You have a Vax running VMS?

Bud

William Hamblen wrote:
>
> Unless you have a printer output filter Linux and other
> Unix-like operating systems will just send data straight to the
> printer and a printer that doesn't start a new line when it
> receives a newline character will exhibit the stairstep effect.
> You want to read the Printing-HOWTO to learn how to set up a
> printer filter with the print spooler you are using.
>
> You have a Vax running VMS?
>
> Bud

i've written various filters for years using the old bsd lpr facility
used in slack versions prior to 8.1 my understanding is that cups raw
devices, this queue is set to raw, can not have a filter and cups does
not have means to do the old if= in a printcap. i suppose a cups
driver is in order, but i've not been able to find a generic plain text
driver.

it's a small alpha, but yep openvms.

gobo

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.

> 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?)

There is such discussion, the plan is to use PDF instead of postscript. I
can't remember where I read about it, maybe it was on lwn.net

BTW doesn't Mac OS X use Cups too?



--
damjan

Damjan wrote:

>> 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?)
>
> There is such discussion, the plan is to use PDF instead of postscript. I
> can't remember where I read about it, maybe it was on lwn.net

Here it is
http://applications.linux.com/articl...2114252&tid=13


--
damjan