printing in debian/unix is hard...

[Carlos Carvalho <carlos@riglos.fisica.ufpr.br>]

I've already sent several bits of my printing tale. Here's the whole
story...

I discovered a few problems with apsfilter, as I already reported.
Then I found that dvilj wouldn't take a dvi file from stdin, as
required for automatic formatting so that you can just do
lpr -Pprinter file.dvi.

And now I tried to make automatic font generation work with the
MakeTeX{PK,MF} scripts. After the above fixes we get the following on
the remote machine:

lpd - apsfilter - dviljk - MakeTeXPK - mf - MakeTeXMF -
wierd error "no more child processes" comming apparently from
MakeTeXMF *SIGH*.

I then tried a radical solution: I linked /bin/sh to zsh beta 18
instead of bash, and VOILA it works! If the bash maintainer wants I
can send more details. I vote for just dumping it :-)


I also reported a bad bug with lpr, which won't let someone remove a
print job on a remote printer. I expect to send a patch soon.

Moral: if you want to have smart printing, use window$ :-( :-( :-(

Carlos