On Tue, 25 May 1999, Dave wrote:

>Salutations,
>
>I have just got back after working away from home, so if I'm repeating
>anything that has already been said, apologies.
>
>We use an old Epson Stylus Color II as a line printer on lpa0, and we use gs
>for printing postscript files to it as follows:
>
>1. From the command line:
>    gs -sDevice=stcolor -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile=\|lp filetoprint.ps

Thanks for the reply.

Actually, I set up an of filter script through /etc/printcap.  (This is on
a ``ps'' pseudo printer. I also have a default ``lp'' printer for direct
ASCII printing, and a pse/pso pair for doing even/odd pages of PostScript
material.)  Thus, I can print PostScript with ``lpr -Pps''; a2ps and dvips
can be directed to send output directly to the ``ps'' printer, then.


Unfortunately, the problem is a little more subtle, I think.

gs works fine in general.  But when I use a2ps to render an ASCII file as
PostScript, then print the resulting file through gs, there is a slight
(one printer-point, maybe?) drift, in general, from one page to the next.
As a result, after about 8 or 10 pages, as I recall, I _have_ to manually
adjust the printer, or else pages begin to straddle the fanfold
perforation.


>Typing 'gs -h' shows all the printers that are supported(quite a lot really),

(I use lq850, to match the Epson LQ-850.  In an older version of
GostScript, I had to use epsonc as the closest match.  epsonc worked
fairly well, except that my printer didn't do color; color pictures
didn't dither very well, then, and came out muddy.  With lq850, colors
are dithered more intelligently into greys.  Black&white pictures look
about the same with either back end, though.)


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu