SUMMARY: LPRng for network printing

From: Lisa Weihl (lweihl@cs.bgsu.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 29 1998 - 20:35:44 CDT


I only received a few responses to my plea for help with LPRng. It seems
that I will have to go through installing a2ps (or an equivalent) if I am
interested at all in having text that wraps lines (that seems kind of
important:-).

Part of my original post:

> So I've bitten the bullet and installed LPRng. I do have it printing text
> to my HP 5siMX BUT once again it's shifted the text to the right a little,
> printing in fairly large font and chopping long lines.

> I think I have printing implemented as a bounce queue which the doc says is
> needed to get the filters to apply BEFORE sending to the Jet Direct card.
> Maybe these printers don't do what I need? Maybe I will have to install
> a2ps and assorted necessary software and use the apsfilter?

What I don't understand is exaclty what the ifhp filters do for the HP
printers if they don't help format text? I guess I was confused by all the
posts on the LPRng group that said they had an HP printer up and running
and were just using the ifhp filters. Don't they ever need to print nice
looking text? Someone please enlighten me if you can.

Lisa - (I realize I still also owe a summary on services for my new server)

Thanks to the following 3 people and their responses:

 Dieter Gobbers <gobbers@faw.uni-ulm.de>

I'm using LPRng on a Solaris 2.5 server in conjunction with a special version
of apsfilter (for LPRng), which IMHO does a great job in converting text and
pictures to postscript...

ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/pub/depot/solaris/System/apsfilter_LPRng-1.1.5.tar.gz

MY COMMENT: this was the same response I got from Patrick Powell on the
LPRng list, who I believe is the author of LPRng.
******************************************************************
Ann Benninger <ahb@exelixis.com>

Not sure what's up with your font problem, but the line truncation is
just standard lp behavior (I believe the BSD lpr does this too).

Take a look at nenscript. It's a public domain version of the Adobe
enscript program that does text to postscript conversion. It wraps
lines, and has other nice features like fancy page headers, landscape
mode and the ability to print 2 pages on 1. I've used it on BSD
systems as well as Solaris.

******************************************************************
Karl Vogel <vogelke@c17mis.region2.wpafb.af.mil>

 Are you sending the file as PostScript, or is the HP doing the
   text-to-PS conversion on its own?

   If you're sending the file as PostScript, is lpr or one of the other
   programs calling an external program to do it? Our version of lpr
   (fairly old) is execing the program "/usr/local/bin/pstext" to do the
   dirty work, which is nothing but a shell script to call enscript. This
   made tuning the appearance much easier; we can just tweak the arguments
   to enscript or mess with the enscript preamble instead of fooling with C
   code.

******************************************************************
Lisa Weihl, System Administrator E-mail: lweihl@cs.bgsu.edu
Department of Computer Science Office: Hayes 225
Bowling Green State University Phone: (419) 372-0116
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403-0214 Fax: (419) 372-8061



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