[HN Gopher] Basic Printing on OpenBSD ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-09-20 23:00 UTC)