I'm pretty new to this list, & to LPRng. I've got it up and working,
basically. (I didn't have any problems to compare with the kinds of
things most of you folks have discussed!) However, there are some
things I don't see how to do. I've at least skimmed through the entire
HOWTO, and searched for keywords every which way, without finding what
I'm looking for - though I suspect that it's actually not really hard,
it isn't the kind of issue that's come up, apparently. (All the stuff
involving queues on multiple hosts, etc., is **way** beyond our needs
now.)
I have no background in using bsd-style printing beyond what I've found
so far in setting stuff up, before we located LPRng. So I'm pretty
ignorant of the background presupposed by most of the LPRng doc.
Here's the situation. We are migrating stuff from a reasonably
standard SYSV Unix system, where lp/lpsched/lpstat/lpadmin rules, to
Linux. The standard bsd-style lpr/lpd setup lost us **way** too many
features that are coded all over into scripts etc., and in looking
around we found LPRng. It looks like major overkill, but I'm fairly
sure it will do everything we need, at least with a few changes.
Now, one thing we are still supporting is printing (on impact
lineprinters, but that's another question) on continuous, pre-printed
forms. We can create a form, give it an alignment pattern, and then
queue up jobs with a command such as
lp -d someprinter -f formname ... printfile
The system holds this job, and any others queued with the -f option, in
the queue, but lets any queued without this option go ahead and print.
Then we mount the form. We disable the printer ("stop" it, in
lpr/lpd-speak, I think) so that nothing at all is printing, tell the
operator to insert the forms, and issue a command (as root):
lpadmin -p someprinter -M -f formname -a
(omitting the "-a" if there is not in fact an alignment pattern, but
there normally is). This does two things:
1. It registers the form as mounted, so that when the printer
is enabled ("start"ed), all and only jobs queued up for this
specific form will print.
2. Because of the -a, it queues up an immediate job (implemented
as a pipe, as it happens) which sends an alignment pattern to the
printer, and goes into a loop prompting the operator to say whether
another alignment pattern is needed.
When all (any) desired alignment patterns have been printed, we
re-enable ("start") the printer so that jobs with this form (and only
they) will print, while other jobs are held in the queue. (So we may
at this point queue up other jobs for this form, and they print, or
other jobs for no form or for other forms, and they do NOT print yet.)
Finally, we reverse the process, mounting (no alignment) the
pseudo-form-name "none", which allows jobs queued with no "-f" option
to print.
I see from the doc that "lp -f formname" is implemented by setting
something called the "print format" (discussed in the HOWTO (version
I'm reading, anyway) in section 6.2) to the first character of
formname. OK, we don't (normally) have enough forms that we can't be
creative in nameing them, I hope. And if I need to, I **think** I can
probably write something to manage sending the alignment patterns,
etc. What I don't see is how to configure things to automatically hold
all jobs for our special forms, then to tell it to print the jobs for
one particular form but hold all others. I'm also concerned about the
overloading of this field; these are normally text jobs, but in a few
cases they are binary, in which case the format type would have to be
"b" or "l", right? (Depends on the physical printer whether this is a
factor.)
Sorry this is so long & complex, but I'm totally at a loss, & trying to
ask it in short, self-contained questions appeared to me to only be
confusing. Any help anyone can give is MUCH appreciated!
(I'll reserve other, tangentially-related questions, for other
messages.)
--
- Dave Lovelace
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