[wellylug] More fun with printers

[jumbophut]

In a prior post I mentioned printing directly to /dev/lp0 using cat,
for the case where printing utilities are not available.  It might
also be useful for testing when there is a chance CUPS/lpd/lprng might
be misconfigured.

Anyhow, I said that I had found out how to do it with PCL5 printers
but not postscript.

I have found a way to do postscript.  Okay, this is not elegant, but
it should work for plain text files 50 lines or less.  With some
tweaking (I can't be bothered right now) multipage would be possible
I'm sure -- just a matter of resetting pos every time it gets to 50
lines and inserting a postscript page command:

echo -e '%\!PS\n/Times-Roman findfont\n15 scalefont\nsetfont\n' >
/dev/lp0 && pos=0 && cat FILETOPRINT | fold --width=70 -s | pr
--length=50 | sed -e 's$\(\\\)$\\\\\\\1$g' | sed -e
's/\([()]\)/\\\\\1/g' | sed -e 's/^\(.*\)$/(\1) show/' | while read i
; if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then exit; fi; pos=$(($pos+1)); do echo "36
$((841-$pos*15)) moveto $i" > /dev/lp0 ; echo -e "\n" > /dev/lp0 ;
done && echo 'showpage' > /dev/lp0

It only requires sed/echo/a shell (or busybox) and textutils.

I can't really test it as I don't have a ps printer.  But ghostscript
is happy with it.

So there we are -- printing from the command line for both HP Ljet and
PS printers.  Ideal for the space/resource constrained, or if you need
to test your printer.

-- 
Tony (echo 'spend!,pocket awide' | sed 'y/acdeikospntw!, /l at omcgtjuba.phi/')