Network printers / PDF / netcat

[Brian K. White]

On 5/26/2012 2:20 PM, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Fri, May 25, 2012, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>> Does anyone here on the list have one of those network printers that
>> supports PDF files directly?  Are you able to print a PDF file by simply
>> using netcat?
>
> I don't know about PDF printing offhand, but on a somewhat
> related note, I put together a python script that does
> essentially the same thing as netcat, but with print servers that
> only support the LPD protocols.
>
> The problem I had to solve was using a couple of fairly expensive
> dot matrix printers with parallel interfaces from SCO OpenServer
> running under VMware on a Linux host with no parallel port.  I
> wasn't able to find any new parallel print servers that support
> port 9100 direct printing, and SCO's support for LPD is basically
> BSD printing which doesn't use the Sysv style interface scripts.
>
> Bill

I've just used rlpr as a drop-in replacement for netcat in these situations.

That way my interface scripts and /etc/printers config file and the 
procedure for setting up a printer in scoadmin stay the same whether 
it's raw tcp or lpd.

I just made a single generic wrapper interface script I called "Net" and 
it gets the name of an interface/model script from /etc/printers along 
with the address/port/protocol info, and executes the OS supplied 
original copy of the interface script that normally gets copied to the 
name of a printer, and feeds the output to either netcat or rlpr, with 
potential to add more protocols like samba except I never needed it 
enough. I just enabled windows native lpd instead every time I couldn't 
avoid printing to a windows machine.
http://www.aljex.com/bkw/sco/#rlpnc
http://www.aljex.com/bkw/sco/#rlpr

-- 
bkw