Re: Help programming printer
Scripsit jse@xmission.com
> I'm not sure if this is the correct place to ask this question,
Unless you are trying to make a Debian package of your port (and then
you should really know such things in advance), it'd quite badly
incorrect. Debian-devel is for discussions of the development *of*
Debian, not general questions about devalopment *on* a Debian system.
> I am trying to port an old MS-DOS program and I have run into a stumbling
> block. The Mess Dos program wrote directly to the printer. I can't seem
> to find much information on how to print from a program in Linux.
You pipe your data into an instance of "lpr". It is customary to give
the user a chance to specify command-line arguments to "lpr", or a
different program, for example to specify which printer to print to.
Giving the option of printing to a file instead is also usually
expected.
While it will usually work to pipe controlescape sequences for the
printer model in question to directly to the print spooler, the
de-facto standard if you want to print something more complicated than
tty text is to produce postscript.
> or the correct mailing list to ask this question?
The closest Debian list is probably debian-user. But since your
question is not really Debian specific, a better choice might be
newsgroups such as comp.unix.programmer (or a local unix user group,
or another smaller but general forum).
--
Henning Makholm "Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit."
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