[cups.general] I do not find anything like unix lpforms

[Helge Blischke]

Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> Dracula <countofdracula at gmail.com> wrote (Tuesday 06 June 2006 10:48):
> 
> 
>>Hello
>>
>> I need to manage forms. On the unix system we used lpforms to do that.
>>How can we do that now?
> 
> 
> I don't know what "unix lpforms" do. Can you give a more complete
> and detailed description what printing task you have to achieve?
> 
> Cheers,
> Kurt

The "good old" UNIX SYSV printing system knows about forms in a manner quite similar
to what good old line printer spooling systems on mainframes support.
In essence, a SYSV forms definition contains things like

           Page length: scaled-decimal-number1
           Page width: scaled-decimal-number2
           Number of pages: integer
           Line pitch: scaled-decimal-number3
           Character pitch: scaled-decimal-number4
           Character set choice: character-set/print-wheel [mandatory]
           Ribbon color: ribbon-color
           Comment:
           comment
           Alignment pattern: [content-type]
           content

(copied from the lpforms man page of Solaris 9). As you see, the attributes
only apply to plain text printing.

AFAIK, CUPS has no equivalent to this, but you could emulate most of this by using
the lpoptions command and setting up printer instances. But assigning a specific form
to a printer in such a way that only jobs using the specified form are printed (and all others
suspended) cannot easily emulated using CUPS (except perhaps by "mis"using the classes concept).

Helge


-- 
Helge Blischke
Softwareentwicklung
SRZ Berlin | Firmengruppe besscom
http://www.srz.de