[HN Gopher] Basic Printing on OpenBSD
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       Basic Printing on OpenBSD
        
       Author : paedubucher
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2020-09-20 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (paedubucher.ch)
 (TXT) w3m dump (paedubucher.ch)
        
       | tyingq wrote:
       | Brings back memories of trying to get HPGL, PCL, or other non-
       | postscript printers working with various flavors of Unix, lpd
       | filter scripts, trying to get a form feed to spit out the paper,
       | etc. Pretty sure there's an ugly Perl script of mine still doing
       | this at a previous employer.
       | 
       | My friends and I used to create a little mayhem sending bursts of
       | form feeds to the DEC band printer in the lab when the teacher
       | was near it. It would shoot out paper 5 feet or so.
        
         | paedubucher wrote:
         | Reminds me a bit of the prank they played at AT&T by sending
         | reverse form feeds to the printer, so that the victim had to
         | insert the paper afresh.
        
           | cogburnd02 wrote:
           | > reverse form feeds
           | 
           | A form feed is 0x0C or ^L in ASCII. What the heck is a
           | reverse form feed?
        
         | znpy wrote:
         | It brought me memories of being 15 and hooking up a parallel
         | (lpt) epson printer (a miniplotter really) to a netbsd machine,
         | failing miserably and failing miserably.
         | 
         | Text printed fine (mostly), anything else resulted in pages and
         | pages of ascii characters (lol).
        
       | tehabe wrote:
       | I remember lpd with some horror and was very glad when CUPS came
       | along, made printing on Linux even easier than on Windows.
        
         | paedubucher wrote:
         | I recently also suffered through some horrors with Cups. A new
         | version was released, and old drivers didn't work together with
         | it. And the manufacturer (Samsung, which sold its printer
         | business to HP) didn't provide updated drivers, of course. So
         | I'm happy to have some reliable facility to at least print
         | PostScript. But Cups is fine if you get a proper and current
         | driver for your printer.
        
           | tyingq wrote:
           | I imagine being a CUPS maintainer is not a good experience.
           | They did something great, but probably only hear from end
           | users when they are frustrated and not inclined to be civil.
        
             | projektfu wrote:
             | Doesn't Apple maintain CUPS?
        
               | tyingq wrote:
               | Maybe? Wikipedia says
               | 
               |  _" In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the
               | printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[6] In February 2007,
               | Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and
               | purchased the CUPS source code.[7] On December 20, 2019
               | Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left
               | Apple.[8]"_
        
               | projektfu wrote:
               | I hope they recognize it's a little bit important. A lot
               | of their users still produce paper.
        
               | stqism wrote:
               | On his blog post he mentioned that there are still 2
               | other apple engineers working on CUPS, and that Apple
               | still very much owns the code.
               | 
               | I can't imagine it going away anytime soon.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | Printing in Windows is frustrating because the printer
         | manufacturers insist on including their shite user space tools.
         | It's often difficult to get "just the driver, thank you"
         | without all the cruft.
         | 
         | The Windows driver setup seems fairly rich and well done
         | otherwise. Though I do have to occasionally run services.msc to
         | bounce the spooler when it has a stale idea of printer
         | state...like "out of paper".
        
           | tonyedgecombe wrote:
           | Often you can unzip them and look for a subfolder containing
           | the .inf files and install those directly.
        
             | seqizz wrote:
             | This was the best trick I had when I was using Windows, for
             | ALL drivers I can extract. No bloatware, no weird apps on
             | the background.
        
           | sebazzz wrote:
           | > Though I do have to occasionally run services.msc to bounce
           | the spooler when it has a stale idea of printer state...
           | 
           | Especially for networked printers that is annoying! If I
           | forgot to turn on my printer it always needs this trickery to
           | get Windows to realise I've now actually turned it on.
        
         | pfortuny wrote:
         | I'm totally amazed: at my Dpt. people (windows) have to print
         | using a specific driver because otherwise they "cannot". Their
         | prints get logged (uid).
         | 
         | I just lpr and that is it. Log: "user".... It is a postscript
         | printer.
         | 
         | Sometimes they cannot print because the authentication server
         | is down...
        
         | asveikau wrote:
         | I feel like lpd is quite a bit simpler than cups and I still
         | use it.
        
           | juped wrote:
           | If I had to use CUPS to print from a printer, I would get rid
           | of the printer.
        
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       (page generated 2020-09-20 23:00 UTC)