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Re: [LUG] printing using lpr

 

On Tue, 18 May 2010, Paul Sutton wrote:

Hi

Just been printing my end of course assessment essay for the open
university,  thankfully good ol lpr works properly as hitting print in
document viewer fails

anyway doing lpr eca.pdf prints the file, but from page 1 - 16,  i just
wondered if there was a way to print in reverse so that once printed the
pages are in the correct order. saves having to sort manually.

looking at the man page i can't find anything but perhaps someone else
has another solution.

Essay gets sent off later today (as its now tuesday),  so i can finally
think about upgrading to lucid, which may fix the above problem.
lpr is a basic program that takes a file and passe it to lpd which then 
handles the printing of it - possibly feeding the file through some 
filters first.
So lpr really has no idea of the file format - it just moves files. It 
can't handle pages because it doesn't know what a page is.
You need to get the generating program to save/print just the pages you 
need.

I use lpr - that's real genuine lpr/lpd and not CUPS in disguise because it's always been there and ... 29 years ago lpd was the first "proper" C program I worked on. I made modifications to it to make it work on our local PDP11 system running Unix v6 which I was told were then fed back into the "system", but who knows what was really going on back then! (Printcap was somewhat simpler because we had no network back then!)
When I first looked at CUPS, I have to say that I was horrified to find a 
system application with a built-in web browser for configuration rather 
than a simple text file, but I guess that's progress for you (Still 
wondering why your systems boot so slowly? It's bloat in underlying system 
utilities that I reckon really don't need to be there)
But then maybe I'm just boring, however, I've had no issues for the past 
15 years or so treating everything as a postscript printer, then using gs 
to convert PS into native printer format as an lpd filter (Although my 
current printer handles postscript natively)
(The exception is the few photo-printers I've had which work better when 
directly connected, although the last one - Epson 1270 worked just fine 
with 'gs' to provide a wrapper for it for generic printing and the old 
gimp-print to drive it directly when photo printing)
It's f'ing annoying though - just about everything assumes you have CUPS 
now. My AAO needs the CUPS libraries because it's window manager dictates 
it - even though I'll never ever print a single document directly from it. 
What a waste of what precious disk space is has. Even my desktop needs 
libcups2 because libgtk2+ needs it. A graphics toolkit needs printers, I 
ask you!!!
So I have postscript printers (even when I don't - 'gs' to the rescue), 
programs that generate postscript (even when they don't; enscript and 
others to the rescue) and life is simple.
Gordon

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