OT: Linux/CUPS/stair-stepping

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 09:41:27AM -0800, Jim Asman wrote:
>> > The printer is physically attached to a Windows 2000 server, where I
>> > don't think I have stty.  :-)
>> > 
>> > And while I can possibly modify the printer's internal environment, I
>> > will likely then be screwing it up for everyone who isn't me. 
>> 
>> It sounds as though you are using a "raw" interface. You need to
>> install a text printer in "cooked" mode which will typically inject
>> the <esc>&k2G PCL command at the head of the print stream.
>
>My understanding of CUPS is that if you cook the interface, you end up
>with it rendering the text all through Ghostscript, and out as a big
>PCL image file.
>
>Perhaps that's changed, but -- particularly for dot-matrix printers
>(which admittedly this isn't) -- we've always run business-reports-mode
>printers raw on Linux.

CUPS now support the full SYSV lp/lpadmin/accept/enable system
including printer interface scripts which may be used without
going through CUPS extra rendering for text printers.

We use this to send the appropriate printer initialization
strings to set things like default pitch, duplex, line ending
codes, etc before sending the print data.

Bill
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