[cups] A primer on CUPS and printers

[Jörg Thümmler]

Am 18.02.21 um 15:14 schrieb Johnnie W Adams:
> Hi, folks,
> 
>       I spent the first ten years of my time as a UNIX/Linux admin working
> with very large systems that didn't use printers.
> 
>       Now I do manage printers, and am finding it much rougher going than i
> had expected. I'm right now working on moving CUPS and a couple hundred
> printers from a very old version of Linux to a new one. (RHEL 5 to RHEL 7,
> and no, it was not my idea to let that old RHEL 5 machine live this long.)
> I get the pieces, but I don't yet have an overview of what I'm doing.
> 
>       Can someone recommend a primer or a reading path through the CUPS
> documentation?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>       John A
> 

Hi,

you might have seen, the localhost:631 website has quite good references 
for the configs. Mostly you don't need that more.

Apples view on this you can find here:
https://opensource.apple.com/source/cups/cups-30/doc/sam.pdf

There will be more in the www, but usually, if you don't have to manage 
very special things, this is enough. If your users use modern software, 
as office, webbrowser, mailer using a graphical desktop, printing will 
be done as in window$.
Other software (if without own special drivers) should put out 
postscript, which cups converts into the printer language, the used 
printer understands. Usually the "lpr" command is used this way.
And you can write own "drivers"  and pipe the data to an "raw" printer, 
which just sends the data without conversion to the used printer by "lpr".
If you have simple txt data, you can use "enscript" to generate ps from 
that.
A thing i often use as a shortcut for programming graphic output from 
data without complex office stuff is: producing html output, then 
converting in pdf by "wkhtmltopdf" and then converting to ps by "pdf2ps" 
and then sending as ps to a ps printer. Sounds strange, but is fast and 
good quality...

hth - feel free to ask further...

-- 
cu

jth