Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 20:24:14 +0200 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Frank Shute <frank@shute.org.uk> Cc: questions@freebsd.org, Chabane HEMDANI <hemdani2009@gmail.com> Subject: Re: The nightmarish problem of installing a printer Message-ID: <20100917202414.8d259989.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <20100917171056.GA72692@orange.esperance-linux.co.uk> References: <AANLkTim89g-u-S4D0q-a_BgiG7Oy57dB-BDznN74g29A@mail.gmail.com> <20100917171056.GA72692@orange.esperance-linux.co.uk>
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On Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:10:56 +0100, Frank Shute <frank@shute.org.uk> wrote: > I'm not going to tell you how to print with CUPS as it's too > complicated and fragile for my liking. If you have a printer that understands at least SOME standards, maybe you want to look at apsfilter instead of CUPS; apsfilter is a lightweight, but still powerful collection of printer filters that supports many standards. > Have you thought about using lpd(8)? If your printer can understand > Postscript (and I believe HP Laserjets can) then this can be a fairly > simple process as you just send the raw PS to the printer with lpr(1) > via a spool and filter. If the printer can understand PCL, as many HP Laserjet products do (at least the professional ones from "office class" product lines), you can also use apsfilter for that. In this case, it's even to be considered an overhead as apsfilter uses gs (ghostscript) to turn the PS input into PCL. A short read of "man gs" should give you all you need to know about how to use PCL for your printer. Oh, and professional office-class printers usually are networked printers, so no need to mess with silly USB. :-) > Most Unix applications can produce Postscript or PDF (which can be > converted to PS with ps2pdf which comes with Ghostscript) and LaTeX > can produce PS with dvips. Postscript is *the* default output format for printing in UNIX in general, as well as in X. For LaTeX, there's pdflatex to produce PDF output directly, a very useful tool for automated document production and printing. (Yes, you don't need "Acrobat Reader" to print PDF files, you can just use "lpr *.pdf" to get a stack of PDF files printed without any further interaction.) > I recommend LaTeX for all users, especially university based users who > are going to produce thesis/technical docs. Absolutely. > If your printer can't speak Postscript then you have to use > Ghostscript and something like apsfilter with lpd. As I mentioned. Sadly, there nowadays is a whole bunch of printing stuff, obsoleting one unified system that is to be used for printing. What comes to my mind? Of course CUPS, hpijs, Gutenprint, Foomatic, Gimp-print, several deamons and datafiles... what a mess - it's almost like "WIndows". Sorry. I would like to have ONE thing that is used for printing, and that does support ALL printers, and that does not force the user to search the web (bah!) for some arbitrary binary files. Of course, that's what printer manufacturers seem to want: Incompatible, non-standard and complicated crap, requiring bloated software to run. That's not how UNIX experience should be. My take: Whenever possible, get a professional printer. Think BEFORE you buy it. Even used (!) office-class hardware is acceptable. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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