Hello,
I just spent an hour to figure out how to directly print a document.
I am a little mad about that and please forgive me if I am ranting.
I have a new, fresh Latex installation (TeTeX) and, as I was supposed to,
I configured dvips via texconfig to print to file per default and also to
my two network printers (via lpr), if the appropriate name was given.
I then started lyx and tried to print a test page but nothing happend.
Well, on IRIX 5.3 there are both print commands lp and lpr with there
syntax resp.. So it turned out, that per default neither the
correct way of printing is enabled nor the print command I needed was
found. lp was called instead of lpr, "no problem" I thought.
What kinda annoys me, is how long I needed to figure out why this was going
wrong, and as my morning is already ruined I will bother you with my
journey. Sorta revenge I guess.
First, I did remember, that there is a way to personalize my configuration,
using a local version of lyxrc. Easy enough, I made my copy, scanned through
the file and came to the printer section, where I found out, that I 'd have to
set '\print_adapt_output true'. I also specified LJ4 as a default printer.
Fine so far. Then it said
# The following options are only of interest to people who do not
# use dvips as print command. You may safely skip to the end of this
# section otherwise.
which was fatal in my case, because I closed the file.
Now there was no change in the behaviour, after printing from lyx I could
see in the status-line that the print command was still
dvips -PLJ4 -o foo.ps ; lp -d LJ4 foo.ps
which of course didnt work.
Well, now I was already thinking of posting to my beloved list, when I
remembered those letters of wisdom, saying: RTFM.
The Tutorial doesnt say much about printing. which is fine.
The Userguide has a paragraph about dvips in which it advises
to configure \print_adapt_output and \print_spool_command.
Hmm, "\print_spool_command", "strange enough", I thought,
"havent seen that", but, well I already had done
"\print_adapt_output", so I went on to the next manual Customization,
where I finally found the answer, which was to uncomment
"\print_spool_command" and set the command to blank, i.e. "".
Now printing finally works with all printers that I specify from within lyx.
But I wonder why, the default behaviour is inconsistent, i.e. it
should not be necessary to uncomment '\print_spool_command ""'at all
and if it is really necessary then this should be mentioned in lyxrc, e.g.
# If you have setup (as we recommend you to do) your print program
# (e.g. dvips) to take advantage of the particularities of the various
# printers you have access to, then you should set the following to
# true. Then LyX will pass the name of the destination printer to your
# print command.
# The default is false, because we have unfortunately to cope with
# people who refuse to take the time to configure their system.
# Note that if you uncomment this you will also have to set the
# print_spool_command.
But I would change the behaviour alltogether and encourage the
users to configure dvips correctly to print, but then I guess
we would see hundreds of people posting to the list, that printing
doesnt work.
Unix is such a p.i.t.a. sometimes.
Jm2c.
Roland Krause
Visiting Research Associate - Center for Computational Mechanics
Washington University, Saint Louis
Roland Krause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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