Re: Printing from X11
Re: Printing from X11
- Subject: Re: Printing from X11
- From: Vivien Mary Kendon <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 07:07:29 -0800 (PST)
If you are lucky (and maybe if you happen to have a postscript printer
installed anyway, see quoted comments below) then things just work
automagically. But besides the lack of postscript filter, there are a
couple of other things that aren't optimal for command line printing or
printing from X apps and I've been wondering what sort of bug to file on
this for a while, so I'll mention the issues here and see if anyone
agrees:
Most printers have tons of fancy options that you can access via their
printer drivers if you use the Print Center level of Aqua printing (like
duplex, special trays, draft or high quality, color or not...) If you
want to set any of these using lpr there is no obvious way to do this (and
it is probably very printer-specific anyway). I work around this by
having more than one entry for each printer, with different default
settings, so I can use different ones from lpr/X apps. I don't need so
many different ones after all. I also set a different default printer for
X/lpr than I have in Aqua by setting the PRINTER environment variable in
my bash shell (else it does, as noted, use the Aqua default).
But the way that the Print Center writes entries into
/etc/cups/printers.conf doesn't support X/lpr very well. It makes the tag
out of the IP address instead of giving it a nice nickname (I mean the
entry in angle brackets, e.g. <Printer 155_198_123_45>), and if you
specify a queue name it incorporates that as well! Hardly what you want
to be typing to select a different printer. And actually, not what you
want to see in your Aqua menus either (where it uses the DeviceURI entry,
which is the IP address proper). In Aqua, if you rest your mouse on the
printer name tag, it brings up a floating description (the Location field
from printers.conf) so that can help when you have more than one entry for
the same printer (else you just see the same IP address three times in
the list...).
But I discovered that you can go and edit printers.conf by hand, and
replace the name tags by nice nicknames, and the Print Center is happy (it
doesn't use the nicknames except for displaying them in the queue entry in
the clover-I info about the printer) and X/lpr is happy too and I can
refer to printers by names like laser7, colour62 or whatever I chose.
(You'll need to do this with Print Center not running, and you'll need to
kill -HUP the cupsd to get it to reread printers.conf...)
Cool! But the Print Center should let you set things up like this from
the start! If you try to enter a nickname in the queue name when you set
up a new printer, it just adds it to the IP address to make the name tag,
which in itself wouldn't guarantee a unique tag if, like me, you want
several entries for the same printer for X/lpr purposes.
I have only network postscript printers here, so what I described might
cause problems with other types of printers, I'd be interested to know
before filing a bug...
cheers,
-- Viv
On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, David McCubbrey wrote:
> One thing I noticed first time I printed is that output went to the
> current default printer (as set by OS X's print center). Perhaps
> "behind the scenes" Apple is setting things up so that lpr works?
>
> On Wednesday, February 19, 2003, at 10:21 AM, Eric Dahlman wrote:
> >
> > I was wondering do you have gimp-print or some other aftermarket
> > printer driver installed? The reason I ask is that I could not print
> > Postscript via lpr using the default cups configuration because all of
> > my printer drivers wanted pdf and there is no ps->pdf filter. I wrote
> >
> > On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 10:14 PM, David McCubbrey wrote:
> >
> >> Just try printing, you might be pleasantly surprised! I had just
> >> installed ghostview (gv) via fink, loaded a postscript article and
> >> tried printing. Ghostview sent the output to lpr, but otherwise gave
> >> no feedback. I looked up the job in CUPS and... whoa... says it's
> >> been printed on (my last selected) printer! I went to check and,
> >> yes, it was sitting at the printer.
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