How to write a printcap entry for remote printer

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, 16 Jul 1997, Chuck Bearden wrote:

> 
> I am sharing some printers attached to Win95 boxes, and would like to be
> able to do more than connect from Linux with smbclient and print via
> translate.  I would like to be able to specify a printcap entry for these
> so as to be able to print from pine or lynx or Netscape (when I get X
> running here at work).  
> 
> I haven't found anything in Samba docs or LDP docs yet to tell me how to
> write such an entry on my Linux box for a queue on a remote Samba printer.

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).

not that i know where to _obtain_ such commands from, or exactly how to 
set it up.  please keep in touch, as the cafe needs pine users to print 
out, too, so i'll be tracking this down, as well.


luke