[cups] If you can read this, you are using the wrong driver for your printer.

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

I have also a very flexible, configurable implementation of text-only 
printer support in cups-filters. If you have a not too old cups-filters 
(1.10.0 or newer) on your system, you will have a "Generic Text-Only 
Printer" under the manufacturers/models to choose on your system. If you 
choose this model you get your printer set up with a PPD which accepts 
only text files and under its "Installable Options" you can configure 
everything needed, encoding, line ends, margins, paper sizes and how 
many columns and lines fit on a page, paginated or continues printing, ...

This should suit all text-only printing needs, if not, suggestions and 
patches are welcome.

    Till


On 2018-04-16 19:50, Paul Neuwirth wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Apr 2018 12:06:59 +0200 (CEST)
> Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> wrote:
> 
>> FYI:
>>
>> In gerenal regarding using dot matrix printers in nowadays
>> computing environments you may have a look at the sections
>> about "Printing Plain Text in Printer-Specific Encoding" in
>> https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Using_Your_Own_Filters_to_Print_with_CUPS
> 
> this worked for me, I created a filter to create plain text according
> to page size from pdf (with pdftotext in mime.convs) and recode. Also a
> filter for plain/text to use the printer charmap using recode.
> By this I found out, that the printer does not like CR/LF -which
> results in two newlines.. crazy.. so I added a dos2unix also..
> 
> from ppd:
> *cupsFilter: "application/ibm850 0 -"
> *cupsFilter: "text/plain 50 text2ibm850"
> 
> text2ibm850 is a script containing recode and dos2unix..
> 
>> Because you talk about "diver" I wonder if you really
>> intend to print nowadays arbitrary complex documents
>> in raster graphics mode on a dot matrix printer?
>>
>> Printer drivers usually output printer-specific raster data
>> that is sent (by a CUPS backend) to the printer device.
>>
> it works.. almost with the epson driver.. but same problem as above,
> the output gives cr/lf, resulting in empty lines between raster
> graphics...
> so again, own filters?
> 
> how to declare those filters in the ppd?
> *cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 100 foomatic-rip"
> *cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-pdf 0 foomatic-rip"
> [...]
> *FoomaticIDs: Epson-LX-1050  epson
> *FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "gs -q -dBATCH -dPARANOIDSAFER -dQUIET -dNOPA&&
> USE -dNOMEDIAATTRS -dNOINTERPOLATE -sDEVICE=epson%A%Z -sOutputFile=- -&&
> "
> 
> do I need a script which converts [what?] to a new format?
> 
> or just appending " | dos2unix" to the FoomaticRIPCommandLine ?
> 
> any tips?
> 
> Thank you again for your help :)
> 
> Paul
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