Postscript in define output

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009, Dennis Runolfson wrote:
>Thank you,
>
>Sorry about being vague in my question.  As I indicated I have forms
>defined in pcl in the output talle - and I also have some forms defined in
>Prescribe - which is Brothers print formatting code.  I find Prescribe to
>be more intuitive then pcl.
>
>My thought was to define any new forms in a code that would be compatible
>with any new printer I use - and I was hoping postscript might be it.

Over 20 years ago I developed a set of tools to use with SYSV *nix printing
interfaces that allows one to define a generic printer with a set of print
codes for things like character pitch, underscore, bold, lines per inch,
etc. with run-time translation to target printers which use sane text
printing codes (HP laserjets, Epson, Okidata, Panasonic, Tandy DMP-2100,
etc.).  Over the years I have hacked these scripts to handle BSDish lpr
printer jobs, implementing SYSV style options and filtering which was
necessary on Linux boxes before CUPSs added support for the SYSV style
printer interface scripts and commands.

This is controlled by a couple of ascii files, one mapping the *nix printer
name to a real printer name and system (it can forward jobs via ssh to
remote machines with similar tables), the second mapping printer names to
printer type.  All that's necessary to change a printer, say from an oki320
to an HP LaserJet is to change the destination printer type in the prntype
file.  I have used this when out of town at a client site to change the
invoice printer for my accounting software to point to a printer at the
client's, print an invoice, and it magically appears on their printer.

We have FilePro customers who have been using this on SCO OpenServer
systems since 1984 without problems.

FWIW, my original impetus to develop this was dealing with systems running
Radio Shack Xenix where printers by default automatically generated CRLF
sequences when seeing line feeds, but the Radio Shack/RealWorld accounting
software sent CRLF resulting in double-spaced reports.  They also padded
pages out to 66 lines which often caused an extra blank page at the end of
print jobs.  My interface scripts strip all trailing whitespace from lines,
inserting printer-specific line ending sequences if necessary.  They also
strip trailing blank lines from print jobs, avoiding the extra blank page
problems.

Bill
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