On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Matthew Reilly wrote:

> OK I've got around my problems with my Stylus 740 not liking my Q700's
> serial ports by getting an ethernet printserver that supports lpr. I've

Just for the record, were you able to print from ZTerm and not from
NetBSD? We should fix that.

> got it printing straight from the command line but I'm having some
> troubles with ghostscript. Once i figured out that you can't use an
> input filter for a remote printer and set up a second spool it seemed
> like smooth sailing. Here's my printcap now:
> 
> lp|stylus740|Epson Stylus 740:\
>         :lp=/dev/null:sd=/var/spool/lp:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:\
>         :if=/usr/local/libexec/lpr/stc-if:
> 
> lp-remote|192.168.0.4-pr| Network printer on Print server 192.168.0.4:\
>                  :lp=:\
>                  :sd=/var/spool/lp-remote:\
>                  :lf=/var/spool/lpd/192.168.0.4-pr/log:\
>                  :rm=192.168.0.4:\
>                  :rp=lpt1:
> 
> the filter stc-if is as follows:
> 
> /usr/pkg/bin/gs -q @stc740p.upp -sOutputFile=- tiger.ps -c quit | lpr -P lp-remote
> 
> It prints fine as long as the resulting file isn't too big, if it is lpr
> craps out with the following:
> 
> lpr:  : copy file is too large
> Broken pipe
> 
> So what's a guy to do? I can't use ghostscript as  filter because my
> printer is remote but gs doesn't like the big binary files. Is there a
> work around?

gs is quite happy, lpr isn't. The lpr at the end of your command line is
what's choking.

Three ideas come to mind:

1) get more /var space so that the output file will fit and/or change
limits so it's allowed.

2) Go digging into the lpd code, and find where it communicates with a
remote printer queue. Rip that code out and beat on it so it will send out
what it reads from stdin, rather than a spool file.

3) Assuming you can get individual pages out, use the ps utilities in
pkgsrc to break your many-page document into single pages, and print them
one job at a time.

Sorry!

Take care,

Bill