Printing from Solaris to Novell LAN printer: How best to do LF->CR/LF translation?
Kenny McCormack
Printing from Solaris to Novell LAN printer:
How best to do LF->CR/LF translation?
We have setup a printer definition to print to a printer on a Novell LAN.
It works fine, except that you get the "staircase" effect when printing text
files. Three solutions comes to mind:
1) Fix it on the Solaris side. How?
2) Get the people who manage the LAN to fix it on the Novell side
(and/or in the printer itself).
3) Kludge it by writing filters that insert the CR before sending
the data to the "lp" program.
3) is what we are currently doing. 1) would be ideal. 2) is, of course,
time-consuming and unreliable.
Is 1) possible? (BTW, I'm looking at "man lpfilter" as I type this...)
Philip Chee
>Printing from Solaris to Novell LAN printer:
> How best to do LF->CR/LF translation?
Our Unix server apps all print to Netware controlled printers. See below.
>We have setup a printer definition to print to a printer on a Novell LAN.
>It works fine, except that you get the "staircase" effect when printing text
>files. Three solutions comes to mind:
> 1) Fix it on the Solaris side. How?
> 2) Get the people who manage the LAN to fix it on the Novell side
This is what I do. On the Netware side I configure the right filter and
everything works out fine.
> (and/or in the printer itself).
> 3) Kludge it by writing filters that insert the CR before sending
> the data to the "lp" program.
> 3) is what we are currently doing. 1) would be ideal.
> 2) is, of course, time-consuming and unreliable.
What? The Netware Unix Print Service daemons are dead easy to configure.
It's all menu driven and even an idiot could do it. I didn't even have to
RTFM, just poked around the menu options and pressed the F1 key a lot. I'd
say this would be a 30 second job (tops) for any halfway competent Netware
sysadmin.
Philip
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Greg Andrews
>
>Printing from Solaris to Novell LAN printer:
> How best to do LF->CR/LF translation?
>
>It works fine, except that you get the "staircase" effect when printing text
>files. Three solutions comes to mind:
>
> 1) Fix it on the Solaris side. How?
> 2) Get the people who manage the LAN to fix it on the Novell side
> 3) Kludge it by writing filters that insert the CR before sending
> the data to the "lp" program.
>
>3) is what we are currently doing. 1) would be ideal. 2) is, of course,
>time-consuming and unreliable.
>
>
In the Unix world-view of printing, the print server is the place
to perform any conversions on the print job to make it suitable for
the printer. That includes End-Of-Line conversions, such as appending
a Carriage Return character to each Line Feed character. In the Unix
world, the print server machine knows what the printer needs to see
in order to perform these data conversions. The print client does not
have this kind of knowledge about the printer.
So the best solution is definitely number 2 - perform data conversions
in the Novell print server. (or issue the appropriate command to tell
the printer to do so, such as ^[k2G for HP printers)
Number 1 will be hard to do on Solaris 2.6 and later. When Solaris is
told it's a print client for the printer, it won't run the print job
through any filters. Filtering is the print server's job. You'd have
to install the current LP patch, configure Solaris for operation with a
network printer rather than a print server, and add the data-file-type
option to make the Novell print service happy.
On the other hand, if you give the printer an IP address, one of your
Solaris machines can be the print server for the other Unix boxes and
work properly as a print server rather than as a print client that's
been kluged into being half server, half client.
-Greg
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