Printing

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Dec 22, 1997 at 09:43:22PM -0800, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
....
>However, since you're spooling to a Unix box anyway, why not LPR? If one is
>using a lot of shares anyway then I see Samba as a legitimate option, but,
>in this case, the only reason for Samba's existance is to provide a printer
>connection then LPR is better suited, and already extant anyway.

I generally don't use lpr in its vanilla form even on the Unix side,
primarily because I've been using the SYSV printer interfaces for years,
and have a system with a general interface for text-file printing that
converts standardized printer codes at run-time to particular printers (and
gets out of the way for raw files after sending appropriate setup data to
the printer).  All printing goes through an ``lp'' command which accepts
SYSV options.  If it is running an a system that uses lpr, then it inserts
a line at the beginning of the print file, that's read by my print filter
(specified in printcap) to get the options before printing the rest of the
file.

I really don't want to have to deal with this type of LPR filtering on a
Microsoft system.  It's easy with a perl script on any flavor of Unix.

IMHO, Windows machines make useful I/O devices, but I don't put anything on
them that we're afraid to lose, and I certainly don't want the headaches of
programming the damn things!

Bill
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