discovering printer options

[pipitas]

Anonymous wrote:

> It's always driven me nuts with CUPS the way it hides from the user all
> the possible options for a printer. 

There is a way to find out.

If your printer "anonyomous" is installed with a PPD, try this command:

  lpoptions -p anonymous -l

If your printer "remote" is not installed locally, but on remote print
server "cupsserver", try this:

  lpoptions -h cupsserver -p remote -l

You will see what print options are available in each case. That is even
better than Windows, where you need to install a printer first locally
in order to get access to info about its print options.

> In Windows, the gui shows me all my 
> printing options. 

It is not fair to compare a GUI to the commandline....

> But when I look at the lp man pages, forget it; only a 
> small fraction of my printers options are documented. 

Look at the "lpoptions" man pages too.

And if you want a GUI, use KDEPrint with its "kprinter" command. It
shows you all the print options in a GUI. And "kaddprinterwizard" even
gives you a Windows-alike Add Printer Wizard.

> CUPS doesn't even 
> give me the capability to do something as simple as instructing lp to use
> the manual feed tray instead of the default.

Of course it does. If your school did give you the capability to read
documentation (like http://localhost:631/sum.html) it should be not a
too difficult job to find out that one of

  lp -d printername -o InputSlot=Manual /path/to/jobfile
  lp -d printername -o InputSlot=MultiPurpose /path/to/jobfile

would do what you need (depending on your printer model, which you
didnt disclose during your complaint).

Cheers,
Kurt