Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/05/25/0008.html

I use the lpr system that ships with NetBSD.

I have defined several printers in my printcap file.  They all boil down
to a USB->parallel device that in turn talks to the printer.  Usually I
use the ``ps'' printcap entry which uses a tiny shell script as a printer
filter; the script invokes GhostScript to translate from PostScript to
the printer's native language.

Occasionally, I print directly to the default printer, if I just want
to print a few lines of raw ASCII text.  I also have a "uraw" that
goes through the ulpt device directly and is guaranteed to do no translations
of the data.  (The default printer assumes lines of ASCII text and may do
EOL translations, etc.  uraw is handy if I have pre-generated, printer-
specific data to dump.)

I then enable the standard NetBSD-shipped network printer daemon to run
for simple remote printing.

This makes for a nice, flexible system.  I have only two sources of
irritation with it:

 (a) I would like to create a ``dvi'' printcap entry for printing DVI
     files from TeX.  Sadly, the DVI format apparently requires a
     real, seekable file and lpd/lpr tends to assume a UNIX pipeline
     instead.  (You can fake this by copying the DVI to a temporary
     file as part of the filter, but I usually choose to print DVI
     files by manually invoking dvips instead.)

 (b) Mozilla forgets my printing config options (lpr -Pps, thank you)
     every time that I upgrade Mozilla, it seems.

     THat isn't so bad, but Phoenix seems to forget it every time that
     I exit/restart the browser!  (This really isn't lpd/lpr's fault,
     though.)

...other than that, it works pretty well for me.

Some may also recommend something like "magicfilter" that examines
the data and makes a guess as to what you want to do with it.  The
advantage is that you have just one filter/printer to worry about.
The disadvantage is that I think that you lose control over how it
is handled.


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/