SCO Unix ® FAQ section

Printing FAQ

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

How can I print from Netscape without a Postscript printer?

This is an ancient post with no relevance to modern systems.

If you don't have a Postscript printer, you might be able to use Ghostscript (available from SCO's Skunkware Page ) to get some functionality. Ghostscript is slow and has had a few problems now and then, but you might find that you can live with it.

You can install ghostscript from the Skunkware CD; don't forget that you also need the Glib (Graphics Library) package.

To see the printers that ghostscript supports, type

gs -?
 

You may have to experiment a bit to find out what works best with your printer; for example I found that "ljet4" was good for my LaserJet 6L. I suggest that you create a simple Postscript file for testing:

echo "testing" | text2post > /tmp/test.ps
 

so that you don't get page after page of junk if your first try doesn't work.

My script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/gs -q -sDEVICE=ljet4 -r600 \
-sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sOutputFile="-" \
- | lp -dlaser -o raw
 

I call that "webprint", and once you've told Netscape to use it instead of "lp",that's what continues to pop up in the Netscape print dialog.

Or, you can get fancy and build gs support into your interface script, even to the point of automatically recognizing Postscript files. That can be a little tricky, and really has no advantage over the shell script, but some people like to do it that way.

From - Tue Jun 27 06:27:32 2000
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From: Tom Parsons <cis@tegan.com>
Subject: Re: Securing the Root account
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Tony Lawrence enscribed:
| Jean-Pierre Radley wrote:
| > 
| > Wayne Jackon propounded (on Fri, Jun 23, 2000 at 08:18:22AM +1000):
| > | Because I am being difficult.  And that was the pages that I went for as I
| > | was curious as to see how it would be done myself, plus I am sitting on a
| > | Win2K machine and don't have access to a OSR box.
| > |
| > | But seriously, it give him a printable version if coming from a Windows
| > | machine.
| > 
| > Why is it any more less printable than if he'd pointed Netscape on his
| > OSR 5 box to his local help files?
| 
| 
| Because SCO systems don't install by default configured to
| be able to print anything from Netscape (unless you happen
| to have a Postscript printer) ?  Because a SCO user who
| wants to print from Netscape needs to first *know* that they
| need gs, then download it (ppp configured yet? DNS?),
| install it, and then figure out how to make it work-
| starting, of course, with getting the newly installed man
| page to work.
| 
| I'd say that makes it slightly less printable from SCO for
| the average user.

Well, if one is going to use ghostscript, there is a good chance they
have a HP compatible laser and probably be using the HPLaserJet
interface script, in which case:

 man cat | lp -o nroff

is much cleaner.  'Course you need the tools and the knowledge of the
less than well known option.  :-)

--tom 
==========================================================================
 Tom Parsons            tom@tegan.com          
==========================================================================    

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