[cups] Prints with PCL Commands in Body

[Bryan Mason]

On Thu, 2015-06-04 at 13:23 -0400, Jonathan Hannan wrote:
> We have an Oracle Database running on Solaris 10 and a CUPS 1.6
> server running on RHEL 7. ...
>
> The issue that I'm facing is that when generating reports from
> Oracle, the .out file contains PCL commands (s7B and (s0B for
> formatting.  Printing this file retains the commands in the body of
> the printed document instead of rendering the associated text as
> bold.
> 
> ... I've tried a range of PPD files provided by openprinting.org for
> both printers, installing the hplip and other drivers from the
> openprinting repository, restoring the mime.types and mime.convs
> files from backups, and even utilizing some of the 1.1 ppd files.
> So far, we just cannot get either the printers or cups to recognize
> the PCL commands in the file.

The simplest solution to this sort of situation is usually to set up
"raw" print queues to handle these print jobs.  If you're using
lpadmin to set up the print ques, don't specify a PPD file (with the
"-P" option) or a model (with the "-m" option) on the command line (I
think you can also specify "-m raw" on the command line).  If you're
using the graphical utility, I believe there's usually a "RAW" option
when you select the printer make/model (I'm not a graphical utility
person myself, so I don't have much experience with it).

You can also test to see if this will work by just adding "-o raw" to
the command line used to print the file.

CUPS doesn't filter documents to be printed in raw print ques, so the
PCL commands that are put there by Oracle will be sent to the printer
unchanged.

~ Bryan