Re: printing .pdf files
On Thu, Feb 12, 1998 at 09:06:27PM -0500, Carl Fink wrote:
> > In any case, ghostscripts starting at about 4.0 (I think) can print pdf
> > files natively. Skip the acroread step, and just ghostscript it directly.
> > (I'm not sure magicfilter can handle this on its own though!)
>
> How does one print a pdf from ghostscript? The docs for the package,
> like the great majority of free software, seem to be written as a
> memory aid for the programmer who created it and are nearly
> incomprehensible to mere users like me.
Well, IMHO it's not so much the documentation as the command-line options
themselves that suck. Sorry, but defining ridiculous postscript variables
just to change the output filename(!) is insane.
Anyway, you print .pdf files in exactly the same way as you print PS files,
except that the files themselves have a different format, which is why I
wasn't sure magicfilter could handle it. Someone posted a message here
saying that it can -- well, good!
In that case, if you have magicfilter installed, just do:
lpr file.pdf
The obvious solution sometimes works :)
Lacking that, you can render it using the ghostscript command line:
gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=bjc600 -sOutputFile=/tmp/file.bj \
file.pdf -c quit
Then send the file to /dev/lp1, or lpr it, or whatever you do.
By the way, anyone who wants to tell me why that command shouldn't be
gs -D bjc600 file.pdf >/tmp/file.bj
should feel free to do so in private e-mail. Flames accepted as long as you
have a good point :)
Have fun,
Avery
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: