Re: [9fans] Newbie question on printing

[Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>]

Modern Unix printing is a catastrophe.  Plan 9 printing is only a mess.

Lpd is in fact for spooling and queueing on a host machine.
If your printer were shared among lots of people and had
some machine handling its queue, then you'd want to use the
"vogon" example line in /sys/lib/lp/devices:

> clp550n robbys-room     prunelle        clp550n -       post+600dpi     generic lpdspool        lpd     -       -       FIFO

That would print to the spool named clp550n on the machine prunelle.
If your own machine is named prunelle, then that's just going to make
a nice loop that never gets to the printer.

> clp550n robbys-room     prunelle        tcp!clp550n!9100        81920   post+600dpi                     generic         generic         generic         generic         tcppost         FIFO
> 
> But now I am getting timeouts from tcpostio; so my guess is that port
> 9100 isn't quite right or the protocol has shifted.

This is very close to correct.  Port 9100 is the JetDirect port
and is what you want.  It's not clear to me that tcppost is doing
the right thing, though.  Most likely it's for a printer protocol from
an earlier time.

Try putting this script in /sys/lib/lp/daemon/jetdirect and see if it
works better.

#!/bin/rc
generic '{aux/download -f -H/sys/lib/postscript/font -mfontmap -plw+ <
$LPDEST/$FILE(1); echo -n `{unicode 4}} | con $OUTDEV >[2]$PRINTLOG'
'{cat <{echo -d$LPDEST -pnoproc -M^$SCHEDLINE(1) -u^$SCHEDLINE(2)}
$LPDEST/$FILE(1);sleep 5} | lpsend.rc $DEST_HOST' ''

(This is just tcppost except that I've replaced 
"aux/tcpostio -b^$SPEED $OUTDEV" with "con $OUTDEV"
and added a ^D to the end of the file being sent.)

Failing that, you might try and see if

{lp -dstdout file.ps; echo -n `{unicode 4}} | con tcp!clp550n!9100 

actually does the right thing.  It should.
Once we get to a script that works for jetdirect I'll add
it to the distribution.

Russ