How to write a printcap entry for remote printer

[Peter Blake]

On Tue, 15 Jul 1997, Chuck Bearden wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 15 Jul 1997, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
> > it will depend on the printer you have attached.  i spent yesterday 
> > evening connecting an HP laserjet 4L to a FreeBSD box.  the hp is a pcl 
> > printer.  if you print to it in text, it comes out with garbage.  we had 
> > to supress the (text) header page, and suppress the last form-feed, so it 
> > didn't print a garbage header (wasted page no 1) and print a separator 
> > page (wasted page no 2).
> > 
> > as far as i understand any of this, you (and i) will need a separate 
> > printcap entry for the pine (text-only) people, and a pre-processing 
> > command, that turns text into pcl, and feeds the data to the same 
> > physical printer (well, actually, the same printer queue on which one 
> > printer is attached).
> 
> Thanks for the reply.  I believe you are correct that you need a separate
> printcap line for each type of filter you want to pipe to.  My question
> revolves more around how to specify the remote printer host and name, if
> this is different than the normal way of specifying a remote lpd printer,
> and if there were other major differences between Samba printcap entries
> and remote lpd ones.  
> 
> My assumption is that printcaps for remote Samba printers do look
> different.  I am hoping for docs that set this forth in a systematic
> fashion, like Welsh and Kauffman do for other kinds of printers in
> _Running_Linux_.
> 

Hi,

I've replied to queries like this before, but privately. I have a printer
system for pcl5 printers that enables u**x users to print on queues
hosted by WFWG, W95, and NT systems using samba utilities.

It supports different page lengths/widths/sizes, and could be extended to
support different fonts. We are considering ways of getting it to work
with PostScript printers.

If enough people want it, I will write it up and pass it to a maintainer
for inclusion in the distributed package.

Requests to ppb at baloo.tcp.co.uk, please.

---
Peter Blake
ppb at hft.co.uk
ppb at baloo.tcp.co.uk