Re: [9fans] Ideas for an printer filesystem

["Aki Nyrhinen" <anyrhine@gmail.com>]

On Sep 7, 2007 12:54 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
> > The fs does not issue the print command until the descriptor being
> > used to update file contents is closed.
>
> ah.  the print directory is not any old directory, but a special fs.
>
> > And yes, on Plan 9, lp is used. On macosx, lpr.
> unfortunate.

i think so too. gs(1) is the guy who does all the work for home
class printers, so i've never set up lp (it's too damn hard and it's
functionality would be mostly useless anyway!). instead, i've
been happy to type a gs command into a script. it's something
like (can't really check now)

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=hl7x0 -sOutputFile=/dev/lpt1data -q -dBATCH $1

this seems to work with a higher success rate than cups on the
linux distribution of the day. configuration consists of changing
the strings hl7x0 and lpt1data to something that works for you.
if the printer is old and bad and has too little memory, add -r300
or similar to print in bigger dots.

could be you need to recompile plan9 gs, it has reduced support
for printers per default.

i can imagine it'd be easy to make nemos print spooler to exec
a script instead of lp. the script could exec that gs command or
dial tcp for networked or do spam filtering.