OT: skinflinter printing

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Bob Rasmussen propounded (on Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 07:13:33AM -0700):
| On Wed, 13 Apr 2005, Jean-Pierre A. Radley wrote:
| 
| > Mailing an invoice or other document consumes postage stamps.
| > Faxing also costs a few pennies.
| >
| > For those of my correspondents who are 'net-connected, I eschew such
| > picayune disbursements of pennies: using uucp over tcp/ip, I print the
| > output on a printer near the desk of the person who should receive it.
| > ...
| 
| Your approach will work if you have control over, and knowledge of, the
| entire network. In other situations, it has shortcomings. What if you need
| to print fancy, but you don't know what kind of printer they have?

I can send a fax to any machine whose public phone number I know, and
I can email to anyone whose email address I know.  So your solution
is assuredly very generally applicable, though Print Wizard (or other
text-to-PDF filters) and ghostscript are not available on all Unix
flavors out of the box.

I was describing a solution using tools universally available on all
Unices: the uucp programs and the lp program.  It does require specific
knowledge about the remote site. That is not a black hole to me -- it
belongs to a customer, or at least to a collaborator.  Either I or
the site's owner has set up a uucp account&password&schedule for one
machine to call the other, has to have enabled uucp to invoke the lp
command, and I have to also know the name of the printer I want to
use on the customer site.  If I know that much, odds are I know where
it is physically situated at the remote site, and by then it gets pretty
far-fetched to posit that I wouldn't also know its make&model.

If the remote has ghostscript, I can also remotely print a PDF or a PS
file via uucp; or I can do so if the remote printer can handle PDF|PS
all by itself.

-- 
JP