lp printing on OS X

[Mark Gillingham]

On Sunday, February 29, 2004, at 08:31 AM, Robert Heller wrote:

>   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>

Thanks. Very helpful. I was also able to find a CUPS specific solution 
for my Jaguar situation from Eric Dahlman, who provided the following 
scripts and explanation

http://www1.twincitizen.net/~dahlman/

These scripts allows Gnucash and other applications to print with the 
default settings.

Mark