apsfilter compatibility with Talaris printer and SCO OpenServer (was Re: your mail )

[Andreas Klemm <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 02:47:33PM -0800, Hans Kriel wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am thinking about using APSFILTER. I have Talaris printers as
> network device and SCO OpenServer 5.05 with application that prints
> to the Talaris.

Which protocol do you use for printing to the network printers ?
If its lpd, then I see no problem concerning network printing.

Concerning SCO OpenServer. SCO was in former times very
SYSV centric and arranged things in very different (strange) ways.
Their Berkeley lpd compatible tools sometimes (in very early times)
were so broken (for example the lpd startup script), that a restart
after enabling this hung the machine ... I cured it. I trimmed the
over 100 lines large shellscript to only one line, to startup lpd ;-)

Well concerning SCO I'm a little bit burned ;-)

But they also could print to an lpd network printer.
Do they now use an /etc/printcap mechanism ? Do they have
an lpd ?

If you have problems in this area, I'd like to point you to
LPRng, which I think should also be portable to SCO OpenServer.
You should visit their site for compatibility with SCO

	http://www.astart.com/lprng/LPRng.html

You could install LPRng to /usr/local, test and remove all the
other printing bits and bytes that ships with SCO.

> Print job includes embedded tiff images (no extension

TIFF is supported among 33 other supported file types.

> on the file) along with Talaris special form generation language
> called EXCL. Escape codes to draw lines, bar codes, fonts etc.
> Is customization aof APSFILTER possible to do this?

Well, as long as the application generates these escape sequences
you are lucky. You could simply print raw by using the print option
"raw". This sends the print data stream uninterpreted through apsfilter
to the network device, i.e.:
	lpr -Pprinter -Z raw	(use -Z with LPRng and -C with stock
				lpd)

If the application doesn't sent the escape sequences you can
configure global for all or on a per printer basis escape
sequences that are sent before and after a printer job.

See /usr/local/etc/apsfilter/apsfilterrc	(global)
or /usr/local/etc/apsfilter/apsfilterrc/printer_queue/apsfilterrc

# escape sequences to be sent before/after a "raw" print job
# defaults:
#  RAW_PROLOGUE=""
#  RAW_EPILOGUE=""
#RAW_PROLOGUE='\033&k2G\033(s2Q\033&k5W\033&l0L\033&a7L\033(s12H'
#RAW_EPILOGUE='\014'

	Andreas ///

-- 
Andreas Klemm
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