lp print system package? 1

[frumpus]

I can find a ton of information on using lp to print, and I need it for it's lpforms functionality. What I cannot find is what package I need to download to install it.

Is anyone familiar with this package?

 

[Annihilannic]

lp" is the original line printer tool for Unix. "lpd" was the daemon that handled print spooling.

On Linux these days it is implemented using CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), which should be a superset of "lp" capabilities, but I don't know whether lpforms is one of them... try there first I guess?

Annihilannic.

 

[mrregan]

We used LPRng for many years on Linux to control print forms. Unfortunately, the latest versions of Linux have dropped support for it. We were forced to create our own forms control by outputting printing to files identified by form name, then using a daemon to monitor what forms were being accumulated, and provide for releasing them to the CUPS system as directed.

 

[frumpus]

Yeah cups does not support lpforms.

As for creating our own form controls, I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to go about that. Most of what you just said there was japanese to me :-/

 

[frumpus]

It's looking like what I want just doesn't exist any more. cups replaced lp with a superset of lp commands that does not include lpforms. The closest thing I can find is partial functionality provided by lpoptions.

The "good old" UNIX SYSV printing system knows about forms in a manner quite similar
to what good old line printer spooling systems on mainframes support.
In essence, a SYSV forms definition contains things like

Page length: scaled-decimal-number1
Page width: scaled-decimal-number2
Number of pages: integer
Line pitch: scaled-decimal-number3
Character pitch: scaled-decimal-number4
Character set choice: character-set/print-wheel [mandatory]
Ribbon color: ribbon-color
Comment:
comment
Alignment pattern: [content-type]
content

(copied from the lpforms man page of Solaris 9). As you see, the attributes
only apply to plain text printing.

AFAIK, CUPS has no equivalent to this, but you could emulate most of this by using
the lpoptions command and setting up printer instances. But assigning a specific form
to a printer in such a way that only jobs using the specified form are printed (and all others
suspended) cannot easily emulated using CUPS (except perhaps by "mis"using the classes concept).

 

[mrregan]

What programming language do you use to create/spool your documents?

 

[frumpus]

Well, that's complicated.

Currently, we are doing this on the VMS operating system, which we are switching over to Linux.

The documents are generated out of an academic adminstration software package called Banner, produced by SCT. From there, they are passed, along with the form name as variables, to scripts (COM in VMS, bash in Linux) that then parse the print command.

It's looking like in Linux the form name that is passed will have to be translated to a printer instance for lpoptions. So most of it we have figured out.

One problem remains. We need to be able to set fonts. lpoptions does not have font options. Banner doesn't either. So right now we're stuck with a default font that screws up a lot of our jobs. Stuff doesn't fit the page, financial stuff is hard to read, etc.

VMS Forms has always allowed us to choose the font, now we're S.O.L.

 

[mrregan]

Would it be possible to create many printers, each of which represents a form and font, all with the same device or ip address?

 

[frumpus]

Essentially that's what we're doing with instances, but font selection does not appear to be supported.

Is there an option to set a font when submitting a print job using lp maybe?

 

[frumpus]

enscript is the answer to all my prayers. It's even installed already.

"man enscript" for details if you found this thread looking for similar answers.