Printing Question

[yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

Gerald,

I have had flakiness with my printers on Mac OS X (bsd-based) for which 
I use the following shell program:

printpdf.sh (don't forget to make it executable with chmod +x 
printpdf.sh)

gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -q -r600 -sDEVICE=hl7x0 -sOutputFile=myFile $1 $2 
$3 $4 $5 $6 $7 -c "quit"
lpr -PL1_on_192.168.1.111 -l myFile

Note that I need to build a special version of gs to support my Brother 
hl720-class printer. -sDevice is the printer device you want to print 
on. Use gs -h to see a list of possible devices. Once gs builds a 
printer-specific output file, I use lpr to send it to the printer.

On Mac OS X, I just save the file as a PDF (easy from the print 
dialog), but you could use any PS (postscript) driver as your printer, 
I would think, and then save the print PS output to a file to pass to 
gs.

I too found the ability to print essential. 8-)  I hope that this gives 
you a workaround that you can use under linux.

I now have a two stage print process, print, saving file as PDF to 
disk, go to command line and type /printpdf.sh 
PATHTOWHATEVERFILEIJUSTSAVED.PDF (usually it's temp.pdf, unless I want 
to save the job for reprinting/reviewing for some reason separate from 
the original document -- pdf is nicely portable, after all!).

Best regards,

Ima

On May 1, 2004, at 2:01 PM, 
yellowdog-newbie-request@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com wrote:

> Message: 3
> From: Gerald <gerald@fastmail.fm>
> Subject: Re: Printing Question
> Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 13:13:44 -0700
> To: yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Reply-To: yellowdog-newbie@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>
> Ed,
>
> thanks for the tip. However that does not work at least for me. While
> it does recognize my printer it does nothing. I can't print from OO or
> the test page. While I like many things about Linux it's pretty useless
> without the ability to print out my work, plus it's extremely
> frustrating. I'll get back to it again. But right now I have some work
> to do.
>
> Thanks for all the help.
>
>
> On Apr 30, 2004, at 9:07 AM, Ed Sutherland wrote:
>
>> On Friday 30 April 2004 11:53, Clinton MacDonald wrote:
>>
>>> Printing problems are the bane of Yellow Dog Linux, or of almost any
>>> Linux on any platform. People have had more success with solving them
>>> on
>>> the Yellow Dog General mailing list, so I recommend you ask your
>>> question there (we are, after all, all newbies here :-) ). Look in my
>>> signature for directions to the General list.
>>
>> Setting up local USB printing with YDL was a snap, compared to doing
>> it in
>> other distros. The trouble is when you get into CUPS.  But all a user
>> (well,
>> almost every user) has to do is follow the online howto instructions,
>> which
>> basically are find your printer, fire up printtool, create a new
>> printer,
>> name it lp0, and test your printer.
>>
>> Ed
>>