On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 01:48:39PM -0600, Kent West wrote: > Pigeon wrote: > >On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 04:56:32AM -0600, Kent West wrote: > >>Marius Amado Alves wrote: > >> > >>>* Printing/CUPS * > >>>I managed to install cupsys via apt-get and added a printer with the web > >>>interface, but this printer does not show up in the print dialog of the > >>>applications. It's an HP DeskJet on the parallell port. What am I > >>>missing? > >>> > >>[Rant] > >>I'd love to help you, but printing on Linux is _still_ a black art. I've > >>been using Debian exclusively on my boxes for about four years now, and > >>I generally just avoid printing if I can. Of course everyone's going to > >>come back on this comment and say "Use CUPS! It's ultra easy!" or "You > >>did replace the obsolete lpr with lprng, right?" and such, but then you > >>still have to tell Mozilla to print to "qtcups" or to "lpr -PmyPrinter > >>--use-secret-incantation" and configure OpenOffice.org (somehow . . .) > >>and, and, and, and it's just black magic as far as I can tell. And I'm > >>not a stupid person. So the short answer is, "Good luck!" > >>[/End_of_Rant] > >> > >I install cupsys-bsd, and in the "Print Command" dialog box of any > >application I'm printing from I enter "lp". I haven't used > >OpenOffice.org, but this works for everything else I've tried, > >including mozilla. > > > The one machine I tried this on did not work that way (I finally > resorted to using qtcups as the command, which works fine). Of course, I > was printing to a color network printer via IP. And that's my point. > Sure cups works, here, here, and here. But once you start throwing in > the exceptions, a winprinter here, a network printer there, a usb > printer over yon, it seems that there's no canonical solution. I've had > enough success to know that most problems can be overcome, but I can't > answer the original poster's questions, because there's never a > consistent pattern that works for me. The OP's question was about printing via the parallel port on the local machine, and in this particular case my solution does seem to work. It also works for a parallel port printer on a different machine on the local network. The more complicated cases, (winprinters, USB and the rest) I haven't had the need to try yet. Perhaps I am lucky :-) > Don't take this as whining; I'm just saying that my perception of > printing in Linux is that it's still a black art, and I'm not wizard > enough to solve the problem remotely (whereas if I were sitting at his > machine I could probably eventually beat it into submission). Oh, I quite agree about the black art bit - having recently spent some tedious time and a lot of paper tweaking various PageSize, Margins, HWMargins etc. settings in /etc/cups/ppd/*.ppd, trying to get (a) an Apple Stylewriter and (b) an HP LaserJet II to print (1) PostScript output from GUI apps and (2) plain text files fed straight to lp, with correct margins and without clipping the edges. My experience so far has been that getting it to work is fairly easy, but getting it to work just right is not. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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