The Linux Printing HOWTO
Grant Taylor <gtaylor+pht@picante.com>
v3.29, 9 March 1999
This is the Linux Printing HOWTO, a collection of information on how
to generate, preview, print and fax anything under Linux (and other
Unices in general).
______________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1 History
1.2 Copyright
2. How to print
3. Kernel printer devices
3.1 The lp device (kernels <=2.1.32)
3.2 The parport device (kernels >= 2.1.33)
3.3 Serial devices
4. Supported Printers
4.1 Postscript
4.2 Non-Postscript
4.3 What printers work?
4.3.1 Printer compatibility list
5. Which spooling software?
6. How it works, basic
7. How to set things up, basic
7.1 Traditional lpd configuration
7.2 File Permissions
8. Getting Printing Software
9. Vendor Solutions
9.1 Red Hat
9.2 Debian
9.3 Other Distributions
10. Ghostscript.
10.1 Invoking Ghostscript
10.2 Ghostscript output tuning
10.2.1 Output location and size
10.2.2 Gamma, dotsizes, etc.
11. How to print to a printer over the network
11.1 To a Unix/lpd host
11.1.1 With
11.1.2 With
11.2 To a Win95, WinNT, LanManager, or Samba printer
11.3 To a NetWare Printer
11.4 To an EtherTalk (Apple) printer
11.5 To an HP or other ethernet printer
11.5.1 To older HPs
11.6 Running an
11.7 From Windows.
11.8 From an Apple.
11.9 From Netware.
12. Windows-only printers
12.1 The Ghostscript Windows redirector
12.2 The pbm2ppa program
12.3 The pbm2l7k program
13. How to print to a fax machine.
13.1 Using a faxmodem
13.2 Using the Remote Printing Service
14. How to generate something worth printing.
14.1 Markup languages
14.2 WYSIWYG Word Processors
15. On-screen previewing of printable things.
15.1 PostScript
15.2 TeX dvi
15.3 Adobe PDF
16. Serial printers under lpd
16.1 Setting up in printcap
16.2 Older serial printers that drop characters
17. Credits
______________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction
The Printing HOWTO should contain everything you need to know to help
you set up printing services on your Linux box(en). As life would
have it, it's a bit more complicated than in the point-and-click world
of Microsoft and Apple, but it's also a bit more flexible and
certainly easier to administer for large LANs.
This document is structured so that most people will only need to read
the first half or so. Most of the more obscure and situation-
dependant information in here is in the last half, and can be easily
located in the Table of Contents, whereas most of the information
through section 9 or 10 is probably needed by most people.
Since version 3.x is a complete rewrite, much information from
previous editions has been lost. This is by design, as the previous
HOWTOs were so large as to be 60 typeset pages, and had the narrative
flow of a dead turtle. If you do not find the answer here, you are
encouraged to a) scan the previous version at the Printing HOWTO Home
Page <http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/> and b) drop me a note
saying what ought to be here but isn't.
The Printing HOWTO Home Page <http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/> is
a good place to find the latest version; it is also, of course,
distributed from Metalab (metalab.unc.edu) and your friendly local LDP
mirror.
1.1. History
This is the third generation, which is to say the third complete
rewrite, of the Printing HOWTO. The history of the PHT may be
chronicled thusly:
1. I wrote the printing-howto in 1992 in response to too many printing
questions in comp.os.linux, and posted it. This predated the HOWTO
project by a few months and was the first FAQlet called a `howto'.
This edition was in plain ascii.
2. After joining the HOWTO project, the Printing-HOWTO was merged with
an Lpd FAQ by Brian McCauley <B.A.McCauley@bham.ac.uk>; we
continued to co-author the PHT for two years or so. At some point
we incorporated the work of Karl Auer <Karl.Auer@anu.edu.au>. This
generation of the PHT was in TeXinfo, and available in PS, HTML,
Ascii, and Info.
3. After letting the PHT rot and decay for over a year, and an
unsuccessful attempt at getting someone else to maintain it, this
rewrite happened. This generation of the PHT is written in SGML
using the LinuxDoc DTD and the SGML-Tools-1 package. Beginning
with version 3.27, it incorporates a summary of a companion printer
support database; before 3.27 there was never a printer
compatability list in this HOWTO (!).
1.2. Copyright
This document is Copyright (c) 1992-1999 by Grant Taylor. Feel free
to copy and redistribute this document according to the terms of the
GNU General Public License, revision 2 or later.
2. How to print
If you've already got lpd setup to print to your printer, or your
system administrator already did so, or your vendor did so for you,
then all you need to do is learn how to use the lpr command. The
Printing Usage HOWTO <http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Printing-Usage-
HOWTO.html> covers this, and a few other queue manipulation commands
you should probably know.
If, however, you have a new system or new printer, then you'll have to
set up printing services one way or another before you can print.
Read on!
3. Kernel printer devices
There are two completely different device drivers for the parallel
port; which one you are using depends on your kernel version. The
driver changed in Linux 2.1.33.
A few details are the same for both styles of driver. Most notably,
many people have found that Linux will not detect their parallel port
unless they disable "Plug and Play" in their PC BIOS. (This is no
surprise; the track record for PnP of non-PCI devices with Windows and
elsewhere has been something of a disaster).
3.1. The lp device (kernels <=2.1.32)
The Linux kernel (<=2.1.32), assuming you have compiled in or loaded
the lp device (the output of cat /proc/devices should include the
device lp if it is loaded), provides one or more of /dev/lp0,
/dev/lp1, and /dev/lp2. These are NOT assigned dynamically, rather,
each corresponds to a specific hardware I/O address. This means that
your first printer may be lp0 or lp1 depending on your hardware. Just
try both.
A few users have reported that their bidirectional lp ports aren't
detected if they use an older unidirectional printer cable. Check
that you've got a decent cable.
One cannot run the plip and lp drivers at the same time on any given
port (under 2.0, anyway). You can, however, have one or the other
driver loaded at any given time either manually, or by kerneld with
version 2.x (and later 1.3.x) kernels. By carefully setting the
interrupts and such, you can supposedly run plip on one port and lp on
the other. One person did so by editing the drivers; I eagerly await
a success report of someone doing so with only a clever command line.
There is a little utility called tunelp floating about with which you,
as root, can tune the Linux 2.0 lp device's interrupt usage, polling
rate, and other options.
When the lp driver is built into the kernel, the kernel will accept an
lp= option to set interrupts and io addresses:
When the lp driver is built in to the kernel, you may use the
LILO/LOADLIN command line to set the port addresses and interrupts
that the driver will use.
Syntax: lp=port0[,irq0[,port1[,irq1[,port2[,irq2]]]]]
For example: lp=0x378,0 or lp=0x278,5,0x378,7 **
Note that if this feature is used, you must specify *all* the ports
you want considered, there are no defaults. You can disable a
built-in driver with lp=0.
When loaded as a module, it is possible to specify io addresses and
interrupt lines on the insmod command line (or in /etc/conf.modules so
as to affect kerneld) using the usual module argument syntax. The
parameters are io=port0,port1,port2 and irq=irq0,irq1,irq2. Read ye
the man page for insmod for more information on this.
**For those of you who (like me) can never find the standard port
numbers when you need them, they are as in the second example above.
The other port (lp0) is at 0x3bc. I've no idea what interrupt it
usually uses.
The source code for the Linux 2.0 parallel port driver is in
/usr/src/linux/drivers/char/lp.c.
3.2. The parport device (kernels >= 2.1.33)
Beginning with kernel 2.1.33 (and available as a patch for kernel
2.0.30), the lp device is merely a client of the new parport device.
The addition of the parport device corrects a number of the problems
that plague the old lp device driver - it can share the port with
other drivers, it dynamically assigns available parallel ports to
device numbers rather than enforcing a fixed correspondence between
I/O addresses and port numbers, and so forth.
The advent of the parport device has enabled a whole flock of new
parallel-port drivers for things like Zip drives, Backpack CD-ROMs and
disks, and so forth. Some of these are also available in versions for
2.0 kernels; look around on the web.
The main difference that you will notice, so far as printing goes, is
that parport-based kernels dynamically assign lp devices to parallel
ports. So what was lp1 under Linux 2.0 may well be lp0 under Linux
2.2. Be sure to check this if you upgrade from an lp-driver kernel to
a parport-driver kernel.
I'll cover the parport driver more completely when I find myself using
one, but in the meantime you can read the file
Documentation/parport.txt in your kernel sources, or look at the
parport web site <http://www.cyberelk.demon.co.uk/parport.html>.
3.3. Serial devices
Serial devices are usually called something like /dev/ttyS1 under
Linux. The utility stty will allow you to interactively view or set
the settings for a serial port; setserial will allow you to control a
few extended attributes and configure IRQs and I/O addresses for non-
standard ports. Further discussion of serial ports under Linux may be
found in the Serial-HOWTO <http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/Serial-
HOWTO.html>.
When using a slow serial printer with flow control, you may find that
some of your print jobs get truncated. This may be due to the serial
port, whose default behavior is to purge any untransmitted characters
from its buffer 30 seconds after the port device is closed. The
buffer can hold up to 4096 characters, and if your printer uses flow
control and is slow enough that it can't accept all the data from the
buffer within 30 seconds after printing software has closed the serial
port, the tail end of the buffer's contents will be lost. If the
command cat file > /dev/ttyS2 produces complete printouts for short
files but truncated ones for longer files, you may have this
condition.
The 30 second interval can be adjusted through the "closing_wait"
commandline option of setserial (version 2.12 and later). A machine's
serial ports are usually initialized by a call to setserial in the
rc.serial boot file. The call for the printing serial port can be
modified to set the closing_wait at the same time as it sets that
port's other parameters.
4. Supported Printers
The Linux kernel mostly supports any printer that you can plug into a
serial or parallel port, but there are things to look out for, and
printers that you won't be able to use, even though they can
(electrically speaking) communicate with Linux. Primary among these
incompatible printers are those referred to as "Windows" or "GDI"
printers. They are called this because part or all of the printer
control language and the design details of the printing mechanism are
not documented. Typically the vendor will provide a Windows driver
and happily sell only to Windows users; this is why they are called
Winprinters. In some cases the vendor also provides drivers for NT,
OS/2, or other operating systems.
Many of these printers do not work with Linux. A few of them do, and
some of them only work a little bit (usually because someone has
reverse engineered the details needed to write a driver). See the
printer support list below for details on specific printers.
A few printers are in-between. Some of NEC's models, for example,
implement a simple form of the standard printer language PCL that
allows PCL-speaking software to print at up to 300dpi, but only NEC
knows how to get the full 600dpi out of these printers.
Note that if you already have one of these Winprinters, there are
roundabout ways to get Linux to print to one, but they're rather
awkward and I've never tried it myself. See Section 12 of this
document for more discussion of Windows-only printers.
4.1. Postscript
As for what printers do work with Linux, the best choice is to buy a
printer with native PostScript support. Nearly all Unix software that
produces printable output produces it in PostScript, so obviously it'd
be nice to get a printer that supports PostScript directly.
Unfortunately, PostScript support is scarce outside the laser printer
domain, and is sometimes a costly add-on.
Unix software, and the publishing industry in general, have
standardized upon Postscript as the printer control language of
choice. This happened for several reasons:
Timing
Postscript arrived as part of the Apple Laserwriter, a perfect
companion to the Macintosh, the system largely responsible for
the desktop publishing revolution of the 80s.
It's device-independant
Postscript programs can be run to generate output on a pixel
screen, a vector screen, a fax machine, or almost any sort of
printer mechanism, without the original program needing to be
changed. Postscript output will look the same on any Postscript
device, at least within the limits of the device's capabilities.
Before the creation of PDF, people exchanged complex documents
online as Postscript files. The only reason this standard
didn't "stick" was because Windows machines didn't usually
include a Postscript previewer, so Adobe specified hyperlinks
and compression for Postscript, called the result PDF,
distributed previewers for it, and invented a market for their
"distiller" tools (the functionality of which is also provided
by ghostscript's ps2pdf and pdf2ps programs).
It's a real programming language
Postscript is a complete programming language; you can write
software to do most anything in it. This is mostly useful for
defining subroutines at the start of your program to reproduce
complex things over and over throughout your document, like a
logo or a big "DRAFT" in the background.
It's open
Postscript is fully specified in a publically available series
of books (which you can find at any good bookstore). Although
Adobe invented it and provides the dominant commercial
implementation, other vendors like Aladdin produce independantly
coded implementations as well.
4.2. Non-Postscript
Failing the (larger) budget necessary to buy a Postscript printer, you
can use any printer supported by Ghostscript, the free Postscript
interpreter used in lieu of actual printer Postscript support. The
Ghostscript Home Page <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/> has a list of
supported printers and information on the status of new and
experimental drivers. Note that this page lists supported printers in
the latest version of Ghostscript, while most Linux distributions can
only ship a somewhat outdated version of Ghostscript due to the
license. Fortunately, there is usually a prepackaged up to date
Ghostscript made available in each distribution's contrib area.
Please help improve the Ghostscript printer support page by reporting
your successes and failures as it asks.
Adobe now has a new printer language called "PrintGear". I think it's
a greatly simplified binary format language with some Postscript
heritage but no Postscript compatibility. And I haven't heard of
Ghostscript supporting it. But some PrintGear printers seem to
support another language like PCL, and these printers will work with
Linux (iff the PCL is implemented in the printer and not in a Windows
driver).
4.3. What printers work?
If you want to buy a printer, you can look in several places to see if
it will work. The cooperatively maintained Printing HOWTO printer
database <http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/printer_list.cgi> aims
to be a comprehensive listing of the state of Linux printer support.
A summary of it is below; be sure to check online for more details and
information on what driver to use.
Ghostscript's printer compatibility page
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/printer.html> has a list of some
working printers, as well as links to other pages. And Dejanews
contains hundreds of "it works" and "it doesn't work" testimonials.
Try all three, and when you're done, check that your printer is
present and correct in the database
<http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/printer_list.cgi>, so that it
will be listed properly in this document in the future.
4.3.1. Printer compatibility list
This section is a summary of the online version. The online version
includes basic specifications, notes, links to driver information,
user-maintained documentation, manufacturer web pages, and so forth.
The online version of this list is also interactive; people can and do
add printers all the time, so be sure to check it as well. Finally,
if your printer isn't listed, add it!
Printers here are categorized into three types:
Perfectly
Perfect printers work perfectly - you can print to the full
ability of the printer, including color, full resolution, etc.
In a few cases printers with undocumented "resolution
enhancement" modes that don't work are listed as perfect;
generally the difference in print quality is small enough that
it isn't worth worrying about.
Mostly
You can print fine, but there may be minor limitations or one
sort or another in either printing or other features.
Partially
You can print, but maybe not in color, or only at a poor
resolution. See the online listing's notes column for
information on the limitation.
Paperweight
You can't print a darned thing; typically this will be due to
lack of a driver and/or documentation on how to write one.
In all cases, since this information is provided by dozens of people,
none of it is guaranteed to be correct. It should, however, be easy
to corroborate from the driver web pages and manufacturer web sites.
And without further ado, here is the printer compatability list:
Brother
Perfectly
HL-10V, HL-660, HL-720, HL-760.
Mostly
HL-1050.
Canon
Perfectly
BJ-10e, BJ-20, BJ-200, BJC-210, BJC-240, BJC-250, BJC-610,
BJC-620, BJC-70, BJC-800, LBP-8II, LIPS-III.
Mostly
BJ-300, BJC-4000, BJC-4100, BJC-4200, BJC-4300, BJC-4400,
BJC-7000, BJC-7004.
Partially
BJC-4550, MultiPASS C2500, MultiPASS C3500.
Paperweight
BJC-5000, LBP-460, LBP-660.
Epson
Perfectly
ActionLaser 1100, LP 8000, LQ 850, Stylus Color, Stylus Color
400, Stylus Color 500, Stylus Color 600, Stylus Color 640,
Stylus Color 850, Stylus Color II, Stylus Color IIs, Stylus
Pro XL.
Mostly
Stylus Color 800, Stylus Photo 750.
Partially
Stylus Color 740.
HP
Perfectly
2000Cse, 2500C, DesignJet 650C, DeskJet 1200C, DeskJet 1600C,
DeskJet 1600Cm, DeskJet 400, DeskJet 420C, DeskJet 500,
DeskJet 550C, DeskJet 600, DeskJet 660Cse, DeskJet 690C,
DeskJet 850C, DeskJet 855C, DeskJet 870, DeskJet 870Cxi,
DeskJet 890, LaserJet 1100, LaserJet 2100, LaserJet 2100M,
LaserJet 4000N, LaserJet 4L, LaserJet 5, LaserJet 5L,
LaserJet 5MP, LaserJet 6L, LaserJet 6MP, LaserJet 8000,
LaserJet 8100, Laserjet 5000, Mopier 320, PaintJet XL300.
Mostly
HP 660C.
Partially
DeskJet 1000C, DeskJet 670C, DeskJet 710, DeskJet 720C,
DeskJet 722C, DeskJet 820C.
Paperweight
LaserJet 3100.
IBM
Perfectly
Jetprinter 3852.
Lexmark
Perfectly
Optra Color 1200, Optra Color 1275, Optra Color 40, Optra
Color 45, Optra E, Optra E+, Optra Ep, Optra S 1250.
Partially
1020 Business, 3000, 5700, 7000.
Paperweight
1000, 1020, 1100, 2030, 2050, 2070, 5000, 7200, Winwriter
100, Winwriter 150c, Winwriter 200.
Minolta
Perfectly
PagePro 6, PagePro 8.
NEC
Perfectly
P2X.
Partially
SuperScript 100C, SuperScript 1260, SuperScript 150C,
SuperScript 650C, SuperScript 750C, SuperScript 860,
SuperScript 870.
Paperweight
SuperScript 660i, SuperScript 660plus.
Okidata
Perfectly
OL 410e, OL 610e/PS, OL 810e/PS, Okipage 6e, Okipage 6ex,
Okipage 8c.
Mostly
Okipage 4w.
Paperweight
Okipage 8w, okijet 2010.
Olivetti
Perfectly
JP350S.
Panasonic
Perfectly
KX-P1123, KX-P4440, KX-P5400, KX-P8420, KX-P8475.
Partially
KX-P6500.
Paperweight
KX-P6100, KX-P8410.
QMS
Perfectly
2425 Turbo EX.
Ricoh
Perfectly
4801, 6000.
Xerox
Perfectly
DocuPrint C55, DocuPrint N17, DocuPrint N32.
5. Which spooling software?
Until recently, the choice for Linux users was simple - everyone ran
the same old lpd lifted mostly verbatim out of BSD's Net-2 code. Even
today, most vendors ship this software. But this is beginning to
change. SVR4-like systems including Sun's Solaris come with a
completely different print spooling package, centered around lpsched.
And there are signs that some Linux vendors will shift to providing
LPRng, a far less ancient print spooling implementation that is freely
available. LPRng is far easier to administer for large installations
(read: more than one printer, any serial printers, or any peculiar
non-lpd network printers) and has a less frightfully haphazard
codebase than does stock lpd. It can even honestly claim to be secure
- there are no SUID binaries, and it supports authentication via PGP
or Kerberos.
For the moment, even in light of the new options, lpd is probably fine
for most Linux users. While it isn't the snazziest system, it works
fine once set up, and it is well understood and extensively documented
in third-party Unix books.
If you'd like more information on LPRng, check out the LPRng Web Page
<http://www.astart.com/lprng/LPRng.html>. Future versions of this
HOWTO will include information on using both LPRng and regular lpd.
6. How it works, basic
In order to get printing working well, you need to understand how the
lpd system works.
Lpd stands for Line Printer Daemon, and refers in different contexts
to both the daemon and the whole collection of programs which run
print spooling. These are:
lpd
The spooling daemon. One of these runs to control everything on
a machine, AND one is run per printer while the printer is
printing.
lpr
The user spooling command. Lpr contacts lpd and injects a new
print job into the spool.
lpq
Lists the jobs in a print queue.
lpc
The Lpd system control command. With lpc you can stop, start,
reorder, etc, the print queues.
lprm
lprm will remove a job from the print spool.
So how does it fit together? Well, when the system boots, lpd is run.
It scans the file /etc/printcap to learn which printers it will be
managing spools for. Each time someone runs lpr, lpr contacts lpd
through the named socket /dev/printer, and feeds lpd both the file to
print and some information about who is printing and how to print it.
Lpd then prints the file on the appropriate printer in turn.
The lp system was originally designed when most printers were line
printers - that is, people mostly printed plain ascii. As it turns
out, only a little extra scripting is needed to make lpd work quite
well for today's print jobs, which are often in PostScript, or text,
or dvi, or...
7. How to set things up, basic
7.1. Traditional lpd configuration
The minimal setup for lpd rsults in a system that can queue files and
print them. It will not pay any attention to wether or not your
printer will understand them, and will probably not let you produce
attractive output. Nevertheless, it is the first step to
understanding, so read on!
Basically, to add a print queue to lpd, you must add an entry in
/etc/printcap, and make the new spool directory under /var/spool/lpd.
An entry in /etc/printcap looks like:
# LOCAL djet500
lp|dj|deskjet:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/dj:\
:mx#0:\
:lp=/dev/lp0:\
:sh:
This defines a spool called lp, dj, or deskjet, spooled in the direc�
tory /var/spool/lpd/dj, with no per-job maximum size limit, which
prints to the device /dev/lp0, and which does not have a banner page
(with the name of the person who printed, etc) added to the front of
the print job.
Go now and read the man page for printcap.
The above looks very simple, but there a catch - unless I send in
files a DeskJet 500 can understand, this DeskJet will print strange
things. For example, sending an ordinary Unix text file to a deskjet
results in literally interpreted newlines, and gets me:
This is line one.
This is line two.
This is line three.
ad nauseam. Printing a PostScript file to this spool would get a
beautiful listing of the PostScript commands, printed out with this
"staircase effect", but no useful output.
Clearly more is needed, and this is the purpose of filtering. The
more observant of you who read the printcap man page might have
noticed the spool attributes if and of. Well, if, or the input
filter, is just what we need here.
If we write a small shell script called filter that adds carriage
returns before newlines, the staircasing can be eliminated. So we
have to add in an if line to our printcap entry above:
lp|dj|deskjet:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/dj:\
:mx#0:\
:lp=/dev/lp0:\
:if=/var/spool/lpd/dj/filter:\
:sh:
A simple filter script might be:
#!perl
# The above line should really have the whole path to perl
# This script must be executable: chmod 755 filter
while(<STDIN>){chop $_; print "$_\r\n";};
# You might also want to end with a form feed: print "\f";
If we were to do the above, we'd have a spool to which we could print
regular Unix text files and get meaningful results. (Yes, there are
four million better ways to write this filter, but few so illustra�
tive. You are encouraged to do this more efficiently.)
The only remaining problem is that printing plain text is really not
too hot - surely it would be better to be able to print PostScript and
other formatted or graphic types of output. Well, yes, it would, and
it's easy to do. The method is simply an extention of the above
linefeed-fixing filter. If you write a filter than can accept
arbitrary file types as input and produce DeskJet-kosher output for
each case, then you've got a clever print spooler indeed!
Such a filter is called a magic filter. Don't bother writing one
yourself unless you print strange things - there are a good many
written for you already on the net. APS Filter is among the best, or
your Linux distribution may have a printer setup tool that makes this
all really easy.
7.2. File Permissions
By popular demand, I include below a listing of the permissions on
interesting files on my system. There are a number of better ways to
do this, ideally using only SGID binaries and not making everything
SUID root, but this is how my system came out of the box, and it works
for me. (Quite frankly, if your vendor can't even ship a working lpd
you're in for a rough ride).
-r-sr-sr-x 1 root lp /usr/bin/lpr*
-r-sr-sr-x 1 root lp /usr/bin/lprm*
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root /usr/sbin/lpd*
-r-xr-sr-x 1 root lp /usr/sbin/lpc*
drwxrwxr-x 4 root lp /var/spool/lpd/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root lp /var/spool/lpd/lp/
Lpd must currently be run as root so that it can bind to the low-
numbered lp service port. It should probably become UID lp.lp or
something after binding, but I don't think it does. Bummer.
8. Getting Printing Software
Many prewritten filter packages (and other printer-related software)
are available from Metalab
<ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/printing/>. Such utilities as
psutils, a2ps, mpage, dvitodvi, flpr, etc can all be found there.
For a while, there were several packages out there all trying to make
printer configuration easier. They probably all still exist, but one
of the best and most up-to-date is Andreas Klemm's APS Filter package,
which has a menu-driven printcap configurator and handles practically
any type of input imaginable. If your vendor doesn't ship a nice
printer setup tool, APS Filter is the way to go.
9. Vendor Solutions
This section is, by definition, incomplete. Feel free to send in
details of your favourite distribution.
9.1. Red Hat
Red Hat has a GUI printer administration tool (in the control panel)
which can add remote printers and printers on local devices. It lets
you choose a ghostscript-supported printer type and Unix device file
to print to, then installs a print queue in /etc/printcap and writes a
short PostScript-and-ascii magic filter based around gs and nenscript.
This solution works fairly well, and is trivial to setup for common
cases.
Where Red Hat fails is when you have a printer which isn't supported
by their standard Ghostscript (which is GNU rather than Aladdin
Ghostscript, and which supports fewer printers). Check in the printer
compatibility list above (or online
<http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/printer_list.cgi>) if you find
that you can't print properly with the stock Red Hat software. If
your printer isn't supported by Red Hat's tools, you may need to
install a contributed verison of Aladdin Ghostscript, and will
probably also be better off if you use the apsfilter package, which
knows all about the printers supported by late-model Ghostscripts.
9.2. Debian
Debian offers a choice between plain lpd and LPRng; LPRng is probably
a better choice. I believe Debian also offers a choice of printer
configuration tools; apsfilter version 5 or later is probably your
best bet, since that verison adds support for LPRng and Ghostscript's
uniprint driver scheme.
9.3. Other Distributions
Please send me info on what other distributions do!
10. Ghostscript.
Ghostscript is an incredibly significant program for Linux printing.
Most printing software under Unix generates PostScript, which is
typically a $100 option on a printer. Ghostscript, however, is free,
and will generate the language of your printer from PostScript. When
tied in with your lpd input filter, it gives you a virtual PostScript
printer and simplifies life immensely.
Ghostscript is available in two forms. The commercial version of
Ghostscript, called Aladdin Ghostscript, may be used freely for
personal use but may not be distributed by commercial Linux
distributions. It is generally a year or so ahead of the free
Ghostscript; at the moment, for example, it supports many color
inkjets that the older Ghostscripts do not.
The free version of Ghostscript is GNU Ghostscript, and is simply an
aged version of Aladdin ghostscript kindly given to GNU. (Kudos to
Aladdin for this arrangement; more software vendors should support
free software in this way, if they can't handle full-blown GPL
distribution of their code).
Whatever you do with gs, be very sure to run it with the option for
disabling file access (-dSAFER). PostScript is a fully functional
language, and a bad PostScript program could give you quite a
headache.
Speaking of PDF, Adobe's Portable Document Format is actually little
more than organized PostScript in a compressed file. Ghostscript can
handle PDF input just as it does PostScript. So you can be the first
on your block with a PDF-capable printer.
10.1. Invoking Ghostscript
Typically, Ghostscript will be run by whatever magic filter you settle
upon (I recommend apsfilter if your vendor didn't supply anything that
suits you), but for debugging purposes it's often handy to run it
directly.
gs -help will give a brief informative listing of options and
available drivers (note that this list is the list of drivers compiled
in, not the master list of all available drivers).
You might run gs for testing purposes like: gs options -q -dSAFER
-sOutputFile=/dev/lp1 test.ps.
10.2. Ghostscript output tuning
There are a number of things one can do if gs's output is not
satisfactory (actually, you can do anything you darn well please,
since you have the source).
10.2.1. Output location and size
The location, size, and aspect ratio of the image on a page is
controlled by the printer-specific driver in ghostscript. If you find
that your pages are coming out scrunched too short, or too long, or
too big by a factor of two, you might want to look in your driver's
source module and adjust whatever parameters jump out at you.
Unfortunately, each driver is different, so I can't really tell you
what to adjust, but most of them are reasonably well commented.
10.2.2. Gamma, dotsizes, etc.
Most non-laser printers suffer from the fact that their dots are
rather large. This results in pictures coming out too dark. If you
experience this problem you should use your own transfer function.
Simply create the following file in the ghostscript lib-dir and add
its name to the gs call just before the actual file. You may need to
tweak the actual values to fit your printer. Lower values result in a
brighter print. Especially if your driver uses a Floyd-Steinberg
algorithm to rasterize colors, lower values ( 0.2 - 0.15 ) are
probably a good choice.
---8<---- gamma.ps ----8<---
%!
%transfer functions for cyan magenta yellow black
{0.3 exp} {0.3 exp} {0.3 exp} {0.3 exp} setcolortransfer
---8<------------------8<---
It is also possible to mend printers that have some kind of colour
fault by tweaking these values. If you do that kind of thing, I
recommend using the file colorcir.ps, that comes with ghostscript (in
the examples/ subdir), as a test page.
For many of the newer color inkjet drivers, there are command-line
options, or different upp driver files, which implement gamma and
other changes to adapt the printer to different paper types. You
sould look into this before playing with Postscript to fix things.
11. How to print to a printer over the network
One of the features of lpd is that it supports printing over the
network to printers physically connected to a different machine. With
the careful combination of filter scripts and assorted utilities, you
can make lpr print transparently to printers on all sorts of networks.
11.1. To a Unix/lpd host
To allow remote machines to print to your printer, you must list the
machines in /etc/hosts.equiv or /etc/hosts.lpd. (Note that
hosts.equiv has a host of other effects; be sure you know what you are
doing if you list any machine there). You can allow only certain
users on the other machines to print to your printer by usign the rs
attribute; read the lpd man page for information on this.
11.1.1. With lpd
To print to another machine, you make an /etc/printcap entry like
this:
# REMOTE djet500
lp|dj|deskjet:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/dj:\
:rm=machine.out.there.com:\
:rp=printername:\
:lp=/dev/null:\
:sh:
Note that there is still a spool directory on the local machine man�
aged by lpd. If the remote machine is busy or offline, print jobs
from the local machine wait in the spool area until they can be sent.
11.1.2. With rlpr
You can also use rlpr to send a print job directly to a queue on a
remote machine without going through the hassle of configuring lpd to
handle it. This is mostly useful in situations where you print to a
variety of printers only occasionally. From the announcement for
rlpr:
Rlpr uses TCP/IP to send print jobs to lpd servers anywhere on a
network.
Unlike lpr, it *does not* require that the remote printers be
explicitly known to the machine you wish to print from, (e.g. through
/etc/printcap) and thus is considerably more flexible and requires
less administration.
rlpr can be used anywhere a traditional lpr might be used, and is
backwards compatible with traditional BSD lpr.
The main power gained by rlpr is the power to print remotely *from
anywhere to anywhere* without regard for how the system you wish to
print from was configured. Rlpr can work as a filter just like
traditional lpr so that clients executing on a remote machine like
netscape, xemacs, etc, etc can print to your local machine with little
effort.
Rlpr is available from Metalab
<ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/printing/>.
11.2. To a Win95, WinNT, LanManager, or Samba printer
There is a Printing to Windows mini-HOWTO out there which has more
info than there is here.
It is possible to direct an lpd queue through the smbclient program
(part of the samba suite) to a TCP/IP based SMB print service. Samba
includes a script to do this called smbprint. In short, you put a
configuration file for the specific printer in question in the spool
directory, and install the smbprint script as the if.
The /etc/printcap entry goes like this:
lp|remote-smbprinter:\
:lp=/dev/null:sh:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp:\
:if=/usr/local/sbin/smbprint:
You should read the documentation inside the smbprint script for more
information on how to set this up.
You can also use smbclient to submit a file directly to an SMB
printing service without involving lpd. See the man page.
11.3. To a NetWare Printer
The ncpfs suite includes a utility called nprint which provides the
same functionality as smbprint but for NetWare. You can get ncpfs
from Metalab. From the LSM entry for version 0.16:
With ncpfs you can mount volumes of your netware server
under Linux. You can also print to netware print queues and
spool netware print queues to the Linux printing system. You
need kernel 1.2.x or 1.3.54 and above. ncpfs does NOT work
with any 1.3.x kernel below 1.3.54.
To make nprint work via lpd, you write a little shell script to print
stdin on the NetWare printer, and install that as the if for an lpd
print queue. You'll get something like:
sub2|remote-NWprinter:\
:lp=/dev/null:sh:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/sub2:\
:if=/var/spool/lpd/nprint-script:
The nprint-script might look approximately like:
#! /bin/sh
# You should try the guest account with no password first!
/usr/local/bin/nprint -S net -U name -P passwd -q printq-name -
11.4. To an EtherTalk (Apple) printer
The netatalk package includes something like nprint and smbclient.
Others have documented the procedure for printing to and from an Apple
network far better than I ever will; see the Linux Netatalk-HOWTO
<http://thehamptons.com/anders/netatalk/>.
11.5. To an HP or other ethernet printer
HPs and some other printers come with an ethernet interface which you
can print to directly using lpd. You should follow the instructions
that came with your printer or its network adaptor, but in general,
such printers are "running" lpd, and provide one or more queues which
you can print to. An HP, for example, might work with a printcap
like:
lj-5|remote-hplj:\
:lp=/dev/null:sh:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lj-5:\
:rm=printer.name.com:rp=raw:
HP Laserjet printers with Jet Direct interfaces generally support two
built in lpd queues - "raw" which accepts PCL (and possibly
Postscript) and "text" which accepts straight ascii (and copes
automatically with the staircase effect). If you've got a JetDirect
Plus3 three-port box, the queues are named "raw1", "text2", and so
forth.
Note that the ISS company has identified an assortment of denial of
service attacks which hang HP Jetdirect interfaces. Most of these
have been addressed beginning in Fall 98.
In a large scale environment, especially a large environment where
some printers do not support PostScript, it may be useful to establish
a dedicated print server to which all machines print and on which all
ghostscript jobs are run.
This also allows your Linux box to act as a spool server for the
printer so that your network users can complete their print jobs
quickly and get on with things without waiting for the printer to
print any other job that someone else has sent. This is suggested too
if you have unfixable older HP Jetdirects; it reduces the likelihood
of the printers wedging.
To do this, set up a queue on your linux box that points at the
ethernet equipped HP LJ (as above). Now set up all the clients on your
LAN to point at the Linux queue (eg lj-5 in the example above).
Some HP network printers apparently don't heed the banner page setting
sent by clients; you can turn off their internally generated banner
page by telnetting to the printer, hitting return twice, typing
"banner: 0" followed by "quit". There are other settings you can
change this way, as well; type "?" to see a list.
The full range of settings can be controlled with HP's WebJet
<http://www.hp.com/go/webjetadmin> software. This package runs as a
daemon, and accepts http requests on a designated port. It serves up
forms and Java applets which can control HP printers on the network.
In theory, it can also control Unix print queues, but it does so using
the rexec service, which is completely unsecure. I don't advise using
that feature.
11.5.1. To older HPs
Some printers (and printer networking "black boxes") support only a
cheesy little non-protocol involving plain TCP connections. Notable
in this category are early-model JetDirect (including some
JetDirectEx) cards. Basically, to print to the printer, you must open
a TCP connection to the printer on a specified port (typically 9100,
or 9100, 9101 and 9102 for three-port boxes) and stuff your print job
into it. LPRng (which you really should be using instead, if you're
reading this section) has built-in support for stuffing print jobs
into random TCP ports, but with BSD lpd it's not so easy. This can be
implemented, among other ways, in Perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Thanks to Dan McLaughlin for writing the original version of this
# script (And to Jim W. Jones for sitting next to Dan when writing me
# for help ;)
$fileName = @ARGV[0];
open(IN,"$fileName") || die "Can't open file $fileName";
$dpi300 = "\x1B*t300R";
$dosCr = "\x1B&k3G";
$ends = "\x0A";
$port = 9100 unless $port;
$them = "bach.sr.hp.com" unless $them;
$AF_INET = 2;
$SOCK_STREAM = 1;
$SIG{'INT'} = 'dokill';
$sockaddr = 'S n a4 x8';
chop($hostname = `hostname`);
($name,$aliases,$proto) = getprotobyname('tcp');
($name,$aliases,$port) = getservbyname($port,'tcp')
unless $port =~ /^\d+$/;;
($name,$aliases,$type,$len,$thisaddr) =
gethostbyname($hostname);
($name,$aliases,$type,$len,$thataddr) = gethostbyname($them);
$this = pack($sockaddr, $AF_INET, 0, $thisaddr);
$that = pack($sockaddr, $AF_INET, $port, $thataddr);
if (socket(S, $AF_INET, $SOCK_STREAM, $proto)) {
# print "socket ok\n";
}
else {
die $!;
}
# Give the socket an address.
if (bind(S, $this)) {
# print "bind ok\n";
}
else {
die $!;
}
# Call up the server.
if (connect(S,$that)) {
# print "connect ok\n";
}
else {
die $!;
}
# Set socket to be command buffered.
select(S); $| = 1; select(STDOUT);
# print S "@PJL ECHO Hi $hostname! $ends";
# print S "@PJL OPMSG DISPLAY=\"Job $whoami\" $ends";
# print S $dpi300;
# Avoid deadlock by forking.
if($child = fork) {
print S $dosCr;
print S $TimesNewR;
while (<IN>) {
print S;
}
sleep 3;
do dokill();
} else {
while(<S>) {
print;
}
}
sub dokill {
kill 9,$child if $child;
}
11.6. Running an if for remote printers
One oddity of lpd is that the if is not run for remote printers. If
you find that you need to run an if, you can do so by setting up a
double queue and requeueing the job. As an example, consider this
printcap:
lj-5:\
:lp=/dev/null:sh:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lj-5:\
:if=/usr/lib/lpd/filter-lj-5:
lj-5-remote:lp=/dev/null:sh:rm=printer.name.com:\
:rp=raw:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lj-5-raw:
in light of this filter-lj-5 script:
#!/bin/sh
gs <options> -q -dSAFER -sOutputFile=- - | \
lpr -Plj-5-remote -U$5
The -U option to lpr only works if lpr is run as daemon, and it sets
the submitter's name for the job in the resubmitted queue correctly.
You should probably use a more robust method of getting the username,
since in some cases it is not argument 5. See the man page for
printcap.
11.7. From Windows.
Printing from a Windows (or presumably, OS/2) client to a Linux server
is directly supported over SMB through the use of the SAMBA package,
which also supports file sharing of your Linux filesystem to Windows
clients.
Samba includes fairly complete documentation, and there is a good
Samba FAQ which covers it, too. You can either configure a magic
filter on the Linux box and print PostScript to it, or run around
installing printer-specific drivers on all the Windows machines and
having a queue for them with no filters at all. Relying on the
Windows drivers may in some cases produce better output, but is a bit
more of an administrative hassle if there are many Windows boxen. So
try Postscript first.
11.8. From an Apple.
Netatalk supports printing from Apple clients over EtherTalk. See the
Netatalk HOWTO Page <http://thehamptons.com/anders/netatalk/> for more
information.
11.9. From Netware.
The ncpfs package includes a daemon named pserver which can be used to
privide service to a NetWare print queue. From what I understand,
this system requires a Bindery-based NetWare, ie 2.x, 3.x, or 4.x with
bindery access enabled.
For more information on ncpfs and it's pserver program, see the ncpfs
FTP site <ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/ncpfs/>.
12. Windows-only printers
As I discussed earlier, some printers are inherently unsupported
because they don't speak a normal printer language, instead using the
computer's CPU to render a bitmap which is then piped to the printer
at a fixed speed. In a few cases, these printers also speak something
normal like PCL, but often they do not. In some (really low-end)
cases, the printer doesn't even use a normal parallel connection but
relies on the vendor's driver to emulate what should be hardware
behaviour (most importantly flow control).
In any case, there are a few possible workarounds if you find yourself
stuck with such a lemon.
12.1. The Ghostscript Windows redirector
There is now a Windows printer driver available (called mswinpr2) that
will run a print job through Ghostscript before finally printing it.
(Rather like an if filter in Unix's LPD). There is also a new
Ghostscript driver which will print using Windows GDI calls. Taken
all together, this should(tm) allow a Windows machine to print
PostScript to a Windows-only printer through the vendor's driver.
If you get that working, you can then follow the instructions above
for printing to a Windows printer over the network from Linux to let
Unix (and other Windows, Mac, etc) hosts print to your lemon printer.
That said, I've never tried this since I don't have a winprinter, so
your mileage may vary. All the software involved should be available
from the Ghostscript home page (see the links in the Ghostscript
section of this document).
12.2. The pbm2ppa program
Some HP printers use "Printing Performance Architecture"
(marketingspeak for "we were too cheap to implement PCL"). This is
supported in a roundabout way via the pbm2ppa translator written by
Tim Norman. Basically, you use ghostscript to render PostScript into
a bitmapped image in pbm format and then use pbm2ppa to translate this
into a printer-specific ppa format bitmap ready to be dumped to the
printer. This program may also come in ghostscript driver format by
now.
The ppa software can be had from the ppa home page
<http://www.rpi.edu/~normat/technical/ppa/>; pbm2ppa supports some
models of the HP 720, 820, and 1000; read the documentation that comes
with the package for more details on ppa printer support.
12.3. The pbm2l7k program
Most of the cheap Lexmark inkjets use a proprietary language and are
therefore Winprinters. However, Henryk Paluch has written a program
which can print in black and white on a Lexmark 7000. Hopefully he'll
be able to figure out color and expand support to other Lexmark
inkjets. See here <http://bimbo.fjfi.cvut.cz/~paluch/l7kdriver/> for
more info.
13. How to print to a fax machine.
13.1. Using a faxmodem
There are a number of fax programs out there that will let you fax and
receive documents. One of the most complex is Sam Leffler's HylaFax,
available from ftp.sgi.com. It supports all sorts of things from
multiple modems to broadcasting.
SuSE ships a Java HylaFax client which allegedly works on any Java
platform (including Windows and Linux). There are also non-Java fax
clients for most platforms; Linux can almost certainly handle your
network faxing needs.
Also available, and a better choice for most Linux boxen, is efax, a
simple program which sends faxes. The getty program mgetty can
receive faxes (and even do voicemail on some modems!).
13.2. Using the Remote Printing Service
There is an experimental service offered that lets you send an email
message containing something you'd like printed such that it will
appear on a fax machine elsewhere. Nice formats like postscript are
supported, so even though global coverage is spotty, this can still be
a very useful service. For more information on printing via the
remote printing service, see the Remote Printing WWW Site
<http://www.tpc.int/>.
14. How to generate something worth printing.
Here we get into a real rat's-nest of software. Basically, Linux can
run many types of binaries with varying degrees of success: Linux/x86,
Linux/Alpha, Linux/Sparc, Linux/foo, iBCS, Win16/Win32s (with dosemu
and, someday, with Wine), Mac/68k (with Executor), and Java. I'll
just discuss native Linux and common Unix software.
For Linux itself, choices are mostly limited to those available for
Unix in general:
14.1. Markup languages
Most markup languages are more suitable for large or repetitive
projects, where you want the computer to control the layout of the
text to make things uniform.
nroff
This was one of the first Unix markup languages. Man pages are
the most common examples of things formatted in *roff macros;
many people swear by them, but nroff has, to me at least, a more
arcane syntax than needed, and probably makes a poor choice for
new works. It is worth knowing, though, that you can typeset a
man page directly into postscript with groff. Most man commands
will do this for you with man -t foo | lpr.
TeX
TeX, and the macro package LaTeX, are one of the most widely
used markup languages on Unix. Technical works are frequently
written in LaTeX because it greatly simplifies the layout issues
and is still one of the few text processing systems to support
mathematics both completely and well. TeX's output format is
dvi, and is converted to PostScript or Hewlett Packard's PCL
with dvips or dvilj. If you wish to install TeX or LaTeX,
install the whole teTeX group of packages; it contains
everything.
SGML
There is at least one free sgml parser available for Unix and
Linux; it forms the basis of Linuxdoc-SGML's homegrown document
system. It can support other DTD's, as well.
HTML
Someone suggested that for simple projects, it may suffice to
write it in HTML and print it out using Netscape. I disagree,
but YMMV.
14.2. WYSIWYG Word Processors
There is no longer any shortage of WYSIWYG word processing software.
Several complete office suites are available, including one that's
free for personal use (StarOffice).
StarOffice
A German company is distributing StarOffice on the net free for
Linux. This full-blown office suite has all the features you'd
expect, and you can't beat the price. There's a mini-HOWTO out
there which describes how to obtain and install it. It
generates PostScript or PCL, so should work with most any
printer that works otherwise on Linux. Apparently it's an
Office clone and is rather bloated.
WordPerfect
Corel distributes a basic version of Word Perfect 8 free for
Linux, and has suggested that they will distribute Corel Draw
and Quattro Pro as well, once they are ported. This is probably
the best option if you have an ARM machine; Corel makes the ARM-
based Netwinder Linux computers and is almost certian to offer
ARM Linux versions of everything. You can also buy the full-
blown version and support, together or separately. The Linux
WordPerfect Fonts and Printers
<http://www.channel1.com/users/rodsmith/wpfonts.html> page has
information about configuring WordPerfect for use with either
Ghostscript or its built-in printer drivers (which are
apparently identical the DOS WordPerfect drivers, if your
printer's driver isn't included in the WP8 distribution).
Applix
Applix is a cross-platform (ie, various Unices, Windows, and
others) office suite sold by the Applix company. Red Hat and
SuSE sold it themselves when it was the only game in town; now
sales have reverted to Applix.
LyX
LyX is a front-end to LaTeX which looks very promising. See the
LyX Homepage <http://www.lyx.org/> for more information. There
is a KDE-styled version of LyX, called Klyx; the author of LyX
and the instigator of KDE are the same person.
Maxwell
Maxwell is a simple MS RTF-format based word processor which
started as a commercial product but is now distributed under the
GPL.
The Andrew User Interface System
AUIS includes ez, a WYSIWYG-style editor with most basic word
processor features, HTML capabilities, and full MIME email and
newsgroup support. Unfortunately, AUIS is no longer maintained.
Koffice
The KDE project is working toward a whole office suite. I don't
think it's ready for prime time yet. The word processor will
apparently be a descendant of LyX.
GNOME
The GNOME project also is working toward various GNU-licensed
officey tools. None are available yet, though.
Jeff Phillips <jeff@I_RATUS.org> uses Caldera's WordPerfect 7
for Linux (on Slackware, of all things) and says that it works
well. It apparently includes built-in printer support, as one
would expect. Caldera should have info on
<http://www.caldera.com/>. You can also buy a newer version of
Wordperfect directly from Corel's chosen Unix port company.
Other vendors should feel free to drop me a line with your
offerings.
15. On-screen previewing of printable things.
Nearly anything you can print can be viewed on the screen, too.
15.1. PostScript
Ghostscript has an X11 driver best used under the management of the
PostScript previewer gv. The latest versions of these programs should
be able to view PDF files, as well. Note that gv has replaced the
older previewer "Ghostview"; the new user interface is mch prettier
and featureful that ghostview's plain old Athena gui.
15.2. TeX dvi
TeX DeVice Independant files may be previewed under X11 with xdvi.
Modern versions of xdvi call ghostscript to render PostScript
specials.
A VT100 driver exists as well. It's called dgvt. Tmview works with
Linux and svgalib, if that's all you can do.
15.3. Adobe PDF
Adobe's Acrobat Reader is available for Linux; just download it from
their web site <http://www.adobe.com/>.
You can also use xpdf, which is freeware and comes with source, and I
should think Ghostview supports viewing PDF files with gs under X11 by
now.
16. Serial printers under lpd
16.1. Setting up in printcap
Lpd provides five attributes which you can set in /etc/printcap to
control all the settings of the serial port a printer is on. Read the
printcap man page and note the meanings of br#, fc#, xc#, fs# and xs#.
The last four of these attributes are bitmaps indicating the settings
for use the port. The br# atrribute is simply the baud rate, ie
`br#9600'.
It is very easy to translate from stty settings to printcap flag
settings. If you need to, see the man page for stty now.
Use stty to set up the printer port so that you can cat a file to it
and have it print correctly. Here's what `stty -a' looks like for my
printer port:
dina:/usr/users/andy/work/lpd/lpd# stty -a < /dev/ttyS2
speed 9600 baud; rows 0; columns 0; line = 0;
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
eol2 = <undef>; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W;
lnext = ^V; min = 1; time = 0;
-parenb -parodd cs8 hupcl -cstopb cread -clocal -crtscts
-ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr
-igncr -icrnl ixon -ixoff -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel
-opost -olcuc -ocrnl -onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0
bs0 vt0 ff0
-isig -icanon -iexten -echo -echoe -echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase
-tostop -echoprt -echoctl -echoke
The only changes between this and the way the port is initialized at
bootup are -clocal, -crtscts, and ixon. Your port may well be differ�
ent depending on how your printer does flow control.
You actually use stty in a somewhat odd way. Since stty operates on
the terminal connected to it's standard input, you use it to
manipulate a given serial port by using the `<' character as above.
Once you have your stty settings right, so that `cat file >
/dev/ttyS2' (in my case) sends the file to the printer, look at the
file /usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/termbits.h. This contains a lot
of #defines and a few structs (You may wish to cat this file to the
printer (you do have that working, right?) and use it as scratch
paper). Go to the section that starts out
/* c_cflag bit meaning */
#define CBAUD 0000017
This section lists the meaning of the fc# and fs# bits. You will
notice that the names there (after the baud rates) match up with one
of the lines of stty output. Didn't I say this was going to be easy?
Note which of those settings are preceded with a - in your stty
output. Sum up all those numbers (they are octal). This represents the
bits you want to clear, so the result is your fc# capability. Of
course, remember that you will be setting bits directly after you
clear, so you can just use `fc#0177777' (I do).
Now do the same for those settings (listed in this section) which do
not have a - before them in your stty output. In my example the
important ones are CS8 (0000060), HUPCL (0002000), and CREAD
(0000200). Also note the flags for your baud rate (mine is 0000015).
Add those all up, and in my example you get 0002275. This goes in your
fs# capability (`fs#02275' works fine in my example).
Do the same with set and clear for the next section of the include
file, "c_lflag bits". In my case I didn't have to set anything, so I
just use `xc#0157777' and `xs#0'.
16.2. Older serial printers that drop characters
Jon Luckey points out that some older serial printers with ten-cent
serial interfaces and small buffers really mean stop when they say so
with flow control. He found that disabling the FIFO in his Linux
box's 16550 serial port with setserial corrected the problem of
dropped characters (you apparently just specify the uart type as an
8250 to do this).
17. Credits
The smbprint information is from an article by Marcel Roelofs
<marcel@paragon.nl>.
The nprint information for using Netware printers was provided by
Michael Smith <mikes@bioch.ox.ac.uk>.
The serial printers under lpd section is from Andrew Tefft
<teffta@engr.dnet.ge.com>.
The blurb about gammas and such for gs was sent in by Andreas
<quasi@hub-fue.franken.de>.
The two paragraphs about the 30 second closing_wait of the serial
driver was contributed by Chris Johnson <cdj@netcom.com>.
Robert Hart sent a few excellent paragraphs about setting up a print
server to networked HPs which I used verbatim.
And special thanks to the dozens upon dozens of you who've pointed out
typos, bad urls, and errors in the document over the years.