jw@crystal1.UUCP (John S. Wainscott) (03/05/91)
Does anyone know where I can find a freeware, shareware, or buyware slave printing program for my unix box? ------ John Wainscott jw@sch.com Software Clearing House, Inc.
jw@crystal1.UUCP (John S. Wainscott) (03/05/91)
> Does anyone know where I can find a freeware, shareware, or buyware > slave printing program for my unix box? "Slave printing" means hooking up a serial printer to the extra port on a terminal and being able to print a file to it. ------ John Wainscott jw@sch.com Software Clearing House, Inc.
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (03/07/91)
In article <114@crystal1.UUCP> jw@crystal1.UUCP (John S. Wainscott) writes: >> Does anyone know where I can find a freeware, shareware, or buyware >> slave printing program for my unix box? >"Slave printing" means hooking up a serial printer to the extra port on >a terminal and being able to print a file to it. If you just want to be able to say "program file(s)" or "something |program" and have the output go to the aux port on the terminal, all you need is a shell script like this: # echo "\033[5i\c" cat $* echo "\033[4i\c" Your echo command may vary depending on the codes your terminal needs for transparent print and whether your unix uses \c or echo -n to avoid extra newlines. Generally the printer must be able to keep up with the same speed the terminal runs, although PC's emulating terminals tend to provide flow control. I did a little program a long time ago to provide page-at-a-time output to allow hand feeding a daisy-wheel printer with a prompt to continue or quit before each page. It did some tricky stuff to make it work from Crystalwriter which ran it in the background with only stderr left connected to the terminal, but you could also run it in the foreground and use options to pause or not. I'll try to dig it up if anyone wants it. (Note that it doesn't attempt to do the kind of transparent printing that you would need to run from the print spooler). Les Mikesell les@chinet.chi.il.us