RE: [hpoj-devel] Various

[PASCHAL,DAVID (HP-Roseville,ex1) <dav...@hp...>]

Hi, Alain.

mal...@t-... wrote:
> What I wanted was a printing 
> system that let 
> me give more feedback on PostScript printing jobs for the 
> users.  Something 
> more than "successful spooling at localhost" so to speak.  
> LPRng is quite 
> something but I could not extract the necessary functions in 
> the short time I 
> had.  In other words I haven't seen it report any error code from any 
> JetDirect PCL PostScript printer after some twiddling with 
> printcap and 
> various options.  The mailing list didn't prove to be helpful.
What type of feedback and error codes are you looking for?  I'm not familiar
enough with the JetDirect lpd functionality beyond just printing to the
"raw" or "text" queues, so I don't know if it's capable of what you're
looking for.

>   So I'm wondering now about this PSC500 I have at home, but 
> in a different 
> way that I used to.  Is there out there a full detailed 
> documentation of the 
> commands this printer can receive as well as the error codes 
> it can return?  
PJL isn't supported on the PSC500 to the extent that you can use it to get
job status the way you can with most LaserJets.  I'm not sure if you were
asking about this or something else.

> I would like to experiment a few things.  But so far I've 
> been using CUPS 
> with the PSC500.  And CUPS has this nasty habit of always 
> making an ISDN 
> connection, so I'm looking for something else.
From what I've heard, CUPS includes an IPP (Internet Printing Protocol)
server.  Your system might be configured to dial on demand, which could be
triggered when this server starts up.  If you disabled this part of CUPS, or
at least instructed it not to bind to the ISDN interface, then perhaps this
problem wouldn't occur.  In any case I think it would be wise to do so, or
at least firewall that port off, since you probably don't want everybody on
the internet sending jobs to your printer.  :-)

>   Does the ptal deamon replaces lpd ?
No.  The purpose of ptal-printd is to simulate a character device such as
"/dev/lp0", because lpd and its descendants seem to be optimized for
printing by opening and writing to a device file.  This makes it much easier
to set up printing with the hpoj drivers, because other than starting the
daemon and using a different device path and filename, you can follow the
instructions provided with your particular distribution and print subsystem.

Versions of hpoj prior to 0.7, when ptal-printd was introduced, required the
use of a rather clumsy method of setting printing, which involved
hand-editing /etc/printcap and writing a "wrapfilter" script for each queue,
which invoked the normal filter and redirected the output to the hpoj
drivers.  Not only was this method difficult for many users to set up, it
was unreliable when programs like RedHat printtool rewrote /etc/printcap and
LPRng rudely removed execute permissions from the wrapfilter script.

You can get a good idea of the evolution of printing with hpoj by looking at
the various versions of the PRINT-HOWTO file in our CVS repository, which is
web-browseable.

David