lp printing on OS X

[Robert Heller]

  Mark Gillingham <markgill at uwalumni.com>,
  In a message on Sat, 28 Feb 2004 10:44:11 -0600, wrote :

MG> This is a bit out of range, but someone may know the answer to my 
MG> printing question.
MG> 
MG> CUPS is standard on Mac OS X so that I can issue command line lp 
MG> print_file type commands and my USB printer come to life. It is not a 
MG> postscript printer. I assume I need to run the poscript generated by 
MG> gnucash through another process using the 'lp' command, but I'm new to 
MG> this.

There is a similar situation under Linux.  Except I could never figure
out CUPS and installed LPRng instead.  With LPRng (and plain old LPR
before it), one used ghostscript as a filter to convert PostScript to
printer speak.  I would *presume* that cups does something similar, but
I could never figure out how to deal with CUPS on my Linux boxes.

MG> 
MG> I have imagemagick installed, which has a dandy convert command. I also 
MG> have ps2pdf, which looks like a good thing. Ideas

ps2pdf is a shell script that 'comes with' ghostscript, so you do have
ghostscript installed.  Unless you have some really bleeding edge
printer,  ghostscript probably has a driver for it.  'gs -help' at a
shell prompt will give you a list of supported printer drivers compiled
into the installed version of ghostscript.

At *worst* you can always do something like:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=myprintertype -sOutputFile=/tmp/printerbm.temp foo.ps
lpr /tmp/printerbm.temp

But you should be able to get the lp daemon to do a variation of the gs
command above, but with pipes:

... | gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=myprintertype -sOutputFile=- - | ... > /dev/printer

(There are some other command line options needed, particularly things
like paper size and printer resolution settings.)

MG> 
MG> Mark
MG> 
MG> _______________________________________________
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MG> 
MG>                                                       

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