Re: Need help restoring an old feature

[Michael Loßin <phallobst@xxxxxx>]

On 23-Mar-02 James B. Hiller wrote:
> Ok.  So I took the choice of setting default color mode in apsfilterrc.
> I first tried it in /usr/local/etc/apsfilter/apsfilterrc, and the change
> had no noticeable effect (added a line COLOR="mono".

This won't change anything, since the entry in the queue
specific apsfilterrc file will overwrite it.

> Without taking that entry out, I found the
> /usr/local/etc/apsfilter/lp/aspfilterrc instance, with just the few
> entries that get set by the SETUP script, and I changed COLOR="full" to
> COLOR="mono".  When I printed then, I got absolutely no pretty-printing
> at all - just completely uniform text when printing the mail message.

!?  I think there might be a problem with file type
recognition here -- maybe elm mangles the mail contents
in an unpredictable way, causing messages to be taken
as plain text sometimes. (It might also help to update
your "file" command.)

> Then, I changed the line in the lower-level file back to "full", and
> the printing results did NOT go back to the way they were (the undesirable
> bolding and shading and such).  And then I removed the COLOR="mono" line
> from the higher-level instance, and still no change - I keep getting
> absolutely no pretty-printing.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> a.  Am I adding/changing the correct entry in the correct way?

Using "COLOR=mono" is the same as using the "mono"
command line option (given that nothing else overrides
it).

> b.  Am I doing it in the proper instance(s) of apsfilterrc?

Color settings should be done in the local apsfilterrc
(in the "lp" subdirectory).

> c.  What else could/should I be doing to get the desired effect
>     (pretty-printing of email headers a la 5.2.0)?

The easiest would be to find out which a2ps options
would be producing the correct output. (-> man a2ps)
I don't know what's going wrong on your system, since
I can't reproduce any of that faulty behaviour.

> Also, for ref:  the reason I did not choose to use the "lpr -Zmono /
> -Cmono"
> approach is that I do not know how to set such a configuration change
> in elm, my mail reader.

I guess there's a f...ine manual for elm that should guide
you. I haven't used elm for ages :)

> I haven't tried doing an alias in my /etc/profile
> yet for lpr - do you suppose that might help?

Possibly not, since elm might not even know about that alias,
since it's only visible in your shell context.

>  Also, I haven't tried
> issuing that variant on a file from the command line, because I don't
> know how to manually print an email in the same way to elm would do
> it, since I don't know how elm does it/what other options elm may be
> piping to lpr internally.

The default printing command is normally just "lpr" without
any options, since the applications can't know what kind
of additional parameters your printer system/filter might
support.


HTH
Michael