On 2020-10-24, Mihai Popescu <[email protected]> wrote: > Is there a way to interface LPD directly with GUI apps like Chromium, > mupdf, etc? I mean just to print from GUI menu Print.
Those print menus _should_ offer the option to print to lpr. They traditionally did. If they don't now, then this is worth examining. What GUI toolkit does the application use and what does this toolkit do? The GTK+ case is instructive. Once upon a time, the GTK print menu offered printing to lpr. A number of years ago that disappeared. Why? Originally, GTK produced print output in PostScript. The assumption was that you could send this to any lpr printer, since PostScript has effectively been the standard printer language in Unix for decades. The print menu changed, because GTK had switched to producing print output in PDF. The assumption was that random lpr printers could not handle PDF, so the option of printing to lpr was removed. Fast-forward to the present. Virtually all printers that can handle PostScript also accept PDF directly and have been able to do so for years. Finally, two weeks ago (!) the GTK people relented and have marked the lpr backend as capable of accepting PDF. This means that print-to-lpr is going to become available again in GTK applications. On OpenBSD that will most likely happen with the next x11/gtk+3 update. Are there still any GTK+2 applications with a print menu in the ports tree? Let me know, and I'll take a look at what's up there. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]
