I'm trying to setup my public printers to do 4 pages per sheet, and am having nothing but problems making it work. The system is a Redhat 4.2 box running Samba 1.9.18p4, and the printers are postscript capable HP 4000 and 8000 machines. Using Redhat's printtool to set 4 page per sheet output works when printing via lpr, but as soon as I print from a Win95 box through samba, it's normal 1 page per sheet output. According to the smb.conf man page, the print command is a normal shell command. Unfortunately lpr doesn't appear to have any multipage capability. However, mpage appears to do what I want, but I can't seem to make it work. Ie, the following doesn't work at all: print command = mpage -4 -P %p %s Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks, Mike -- Mike Tibor Univ. of Alaska Anchorage (907) 786-1001 voice LAN Technician Consortium Library (907) 786-6050 fax tibor@lib.uaa.alaska.edu http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/~tibor/ Finger tibor@asimov.lib.uaa.alaska.edu for PGP public key
On Fri, 10 Jul 1998, Herb Lewis wrote:> The problem is the file sent from the windows client. It will be > postscript not text. Your setup for multipage output will only work > with text files. If all you really want to do is print text (not > word documents, etc.) you could set up a printer driver on the PC > for generic text and use that. This file should then be able to be > processed by your multipage filter.Isn't mpage supposed to be able to handle postscript though? Here's a snippet from the man page: DESCRIPTION Mpage reads plain text files or PostScript documents and prints them on a PostScript printer with the text reduced in size so that several pages appear on one sheet of paper. Looking through the Redhat print filters, it looks like mpage is used to handle the multipage output, and then either sent to the printer as raw ps output, or filtered through gs to make it work with a non postscript printer. We're going to be putting two HP 8000's out for public use to replace a bunch of ancient dot matrix printers, and to save paper I'd really like to set this up, and maybe also get duplexers on the HP's as well. Mike -- Mike Tibor Univ. of Alaska Anchorage (907) 786-1001 voice LAN Technician Consortium Library (907) 786-6050 fax tibor@lib.uaa.alaska.edu http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/~tibor/ Finger tibor@asimov.lib.uaa.alaska.edu for PGP public key
> > The problem is the file sent from the windows client. It will be > > postscript not text. Your setup for multipage output will only work > > with text files. If all you really want to do is print text (not > > word documents, etc.) you could set up a printer driver on the PC > > for generic text and use that. This file should then be able to be > > processed by your multipage filter. > > Isn't mpage supposed to be able to handle postscript though?You could also try psnup. It should handle postscript OK. Be careful about any PJL headers that come through from PC clients though (HP print drivers). I have a prog that will strip them off though. Otherwise use a really simple driver like the Apple LaserWriter II driver on the PC. Damian -- ______________________________________________________________________ * Damian Ivereigh * || || * Cisco Systems, Inc. * * MIS Printer Admin * .||||. .||||. * 408-526-4413 * * Linux Bigot * ..:||||||:..:||||||:.. * 800-800-1180 x64413 * * damian@cisco.com * cisco Systems, Inc. * Fax: 408-527-2563 * *______________________________________________________________________*
> > You could also try psnup. It should handle postscript OK. Be > careful about any PJL headers that come through from PC clients > though (HP print drivers). I have a prog that will strip them off > though. Otherwise use a really simple driver like the Apple > LaserWriter II driver on the PC.Hmmm... I grabbed psutils from ftp://ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/ajcd/ and compiled them on my Redhat 4.2 Linux server (with some warnings about several functions in psnup.c:71 possibly being used uninitialized), installed them and setup the following two print commands in /etc/smb.conf: (lines broken for readability) print command = /usr/local/bin/psnup -4 | /usr/bin/lpr -P%p ; rm %s print command = /usr/bin/groff %s | /usr/local/bin/psnup -4 | /usr/bin/lpr -P%p ; rm %s Unfortunately the first one prints out a single page with what I think is postscript error info: %%BeginProcSet: PStoPS 1 15 userdict begin ... The second one appears to format the output correctly, but I essentially get 4 pages per sheet of postscript ascii output (regardless of whether the Win95 driver is set to output ascii or binary data). I started my testing using the HP 4000 postscript driver (I was so overjoyed that someone else actually replied that I overlooked your warning about using the HP drivers ;-) and then I tried the LaserWriter II NT driver--unfortunately the output with the Laserwriter driver is still a bunch of garbage, but I did notice that the PJL headers are gone. Any ideas? Thanks, Mike -- Mike Tibor Univ. of Alaska Anchorage (907) 786-1001 voice LAN Technician Consortium Library (907) 786-6050 fax tibor@lib.uaa.alaska.edu http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/~tibor/ Finger tibor@asimov.lib.uaa.alaska.edu for PGP public key