How to do spooler-less printing

[Till Kamppeter]

vijay wrote:
> Hi Michael!
> 
> Thanks for your reply.
> I agree, but what is the purpose of "directomatic"?

CUPS is a spooler, amd spooler-less printing can so only be done without
CUPS.

And therefore directomatic has nothing to do with CUPS. It is a tool to
print directly to a printer without using any spooler and without
needing to enter an ugly GhostScript command line by hand and also being
able to use PPDs and the options defined in the PPDs. But note that
directomatic is obsolete. It is a part of Foomatic 2.0.x from years ago.
In the current Foomatic 3.x the functionality of directomatic is
incorporated in foomatic-rip.

If you want to print spooler-less using printer drivers and PPDs, use
foomatic-rip (probably part of your distribution) following these
instructions

http://www.linuxprinting.org/direct-doc.html

or simply do something like

foomatic-rip --pdd <your printer's PPD> -o <option>=<value> ... <file1>
<file2> ... > /dev/usb/lp0

Options can be any options defined in the PPD file. Any PPD file can be
used, but for PPD files for non-PostScript printers GhostScript and the
appropriate driver need to be installed.

Spooler-less printing can make sense in environments where resources are
limited or daemons with open ports are unwished, but note that
foomatic-rip only exits if the job is completely transferred to the
printer and during this time you should not modify or delete any of the
input files.

   Till