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On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 01:21:04PM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> You must not write much PostScript.

Actually, I've been known to do so. :^>

http://eclipsed.net/~gr/April1.txt

> This is
> not inherently a problem; what *is* a problem is that lprs I've seen
> don't have any way to override this guess in the case of
> PostScript-vs-text, up to and including lpr.1,v 1.12.  This is one of
> my main objections to using lpr.

Hrm. I think I leapt into that particular conversation without doing
my homework. I'm not near a CUPS-managed printer right now, but CUPS
is only really "broken" if their lpr(1) gets things wrong that ours
doesn't. (Oh, wait, do they always guess, even when given an explicit
argument about what to assume the file is? That wouldn't be very
neighborly of them...)

In any case, printing Postscript as text is, as you point out,
*always* complicated precisely because it *is* text, but the general
case is definitely that you don't want it that way out of the
printer (or on the screen, for that matter). If I wanted a text-only
version, I'd probably pass my Postscript file through enscript
first. (That should just work, right? As it'll put all of the
Postscript commands in the original file inside ()s, making them
strings, not commands?)

> No, because that is file's raison d'etre.

Yeah, well, it was a bad example...

> cc compiles C code; should lpr thus compile any C code it's fed?

=2E.. and of course not. :^>

> Of course not.  And no more is file(1) doing content type guessing a
> reason for lpr to do it.

Right. But lpr sort of *must* do Postscript guessing because the
general case of feeding it a Postscript (ASCII text) file is that
you want the output of its Postscript engine, and the general case
of feeding it a random text file (also ASCII text) is that you want
the contents of that text file spit out on a printed page.

--=20
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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