How to send EOT (\004) and the end of PS job

Post by Anonymous
...
I am not sure whether this is Fedora's printtool or CUPS problem. It
would be helpful, however, if somebody could tell me where and how
should the CUPS configuration be set that the EOT should be sent at
the end of a PS job.

That setting is not used by CUPS - it is a holdover in the Fedora
tool from the old LPRng days...

What CUPS looks for is the JCLEnd attribute in the PPD file.

--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software http://www.easysw.com

Anonymous

2005-05-12 14:56:33 UTC

That setting is not used by CUPS - it is a holdover in the Fedora
tool from the old LPRng days...
What CUPS looks for is the JCLEnd attribute in the PPD file.

Well, I have found refences to JCL... in docs and added <04>
in the last of the following lines (in the imported file):

*JCLBegin: "<1B>%-***@PJL JOB<0A>@PJL SET LMULTIPAGEPRINT=OFF<0A>"
*JCLToPSInterpreter: "@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = Postscript <0A>"
*JCLEnd: "<04><1B>%-***@PJL EOJ <0A><1B>%-12345X"

Then I re-imported the file (is it OK to re-import, did it really overwrite the previous entries?) but that did not change anything.

I can see no *JCL line in the /etc/cups/ppd/lex.ppd file autogenerated by the system. Instead, I found the following there:

*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"
..
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "cat %A%Z"

which (AFAIU it right) means that a PS job is simply cat-ed to the printer, with no PJL commands added. This agrees with what I can see when I set the printer device to a file.

I have (temporarily and improperly) solved the problem by adding by hand 'echo -en "\004&quot' to the FoomaticRIPCommandLine. Now my T430 Lexmark printer gets "Ready" immediately after printing the job. This file, however, gets overwritten every time I change anything in the printer configuration (even when this very printer does not change), so this is surely not the way it should be done.

regards, Michal.

Michael Sweet

2005-05-12 15:27:27 UTC

Post by Anonymous
...
*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"
..
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "cat %A%Z"

OK, REMOVE THIS JUNK!

Just use the standard PPD file. Foomatic causes far more problems
than it solves...

--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software http://www.easysw.com

Helge Blischke

2005-05-12 15:39:54 UTC

That setting is not used by CUPS - it is a holdover in the Fedora
tool from the old LPRng days...
What CUPS looks for is the JCLEnd attribute in the PPD file.

Well, I have found refences to JCL... in docs and added <04>
Then I re-imported the file (is it OK to re-import, did it really overwrite the previous entries?) but that did not change anything.
*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"
..
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "cat %A%Z"
which (AFAIU it right) means that a PS job is simply cat-ed to the printer, with no PJL commands added. This agrees with what I can see when I set the printer device to a file.
I have (temporarily and improperly) solved the problem by adding by hand 'echo -en "\004&quot' to the FoomaticRIPCommandLine. Now my T430 Lexmark printer gets "Ready" immediately after printing the job. This file, however, gets overwritten every time I change anything in the printer configuration (even when this very printer does not change), so this is surely not the way it should be done.
regards, Michal.

Try to modify the *JCLEnd statement by replacing the last "%-12345X" by
"<04>" (without the
quotes).

Helge

--
Helge Blischke
Softwareentwicklung
SRZ Berlin | Firmengruppe besscom
http://www.srz.de

Till Kamppeter

2005-05-12 15:47:06 UTC

That setting is not used by CUPS - it is a holdover in the Fedora
tool from the old LPRng days...
What CUPS looks for is the JCLEnd attribute in the PPD file.

It should also work when you simply add the *JCL... lines. If the
printer does not support PJL, simply try to add

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*JCLBegin: ""
*JCLToPSInterpreter: ""
*JCLEnd: "<04>"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This should work independent whether the PPD file is a Foomatic PPD file
or not.

Where does your PPD file come from? Usually Foomatic is used to make the
PostScript input be passed through some filter which is not a CUPS
filter (and therefore it cannot be called directly by CUPS). Your PPD
file makes foomatic-rip passing the data through a neutral filter:

Michal Szymanski

2005-05-13 07:19:10 UTC

Post by Anonymous
...
*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"
..
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "cat %A%Z"

OK, REMOVE THIS JUNK!
Just use the standard PPD file. Foomatic causes far more problems
than it solves...

What do you mean by 'standard PPD'? I am also exprimenting with my printer (Lexmark T430) configured as T616 (closest entry in the configuration tool). The PPD file generated for T616 says:

*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"
..
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "level=%D; printf "%%!\n%%%% %%%%\n%C&qu&&
ot;; if (( $level > 0 )); then if (( $level < 99 )); then level=&&
" -dLanguageLevel=$level"; else level=""; fi; gs -&&
q -dPARANOIDSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pswrite$level%A%Z -sOutpu&&
tFile=- -; else cat; fi"

I am not sure how to decipher all those if-s but from what I see in the output (when the device is set to a file instead of the printer), for PS jobs it just cat-s them. So the original problem with the job end persists unless I manually add
/bin/echo -en "\004";
just before the last 'fi' in the above command line.

Michal

Post by Michael Sweet
--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software http://www.easysw.com

Till Kamppeter

2005-05-13 10:57:04 UTC

The PPDs you are using are generic PostScript PPDs. They only offer very
basic settings and are only intended for the case that you do not have
the printer-specific PPD from the manufacturer at hand.

Every manufacturer makes PPD files specific to the printer model for
each of their PostScript printers. These files make available all
user-settable options (and not only paper size, resolution, and paper
tray) and also even apply workarounds to small incompatibilities of the
printer's PostScript. So look for the PPD file on the printer's driver
CD, on a Windows box with a queue for this printer set up, or on the
manufacturer's web site. Lexmark gives good Linux support for laser
printers, so you probably will find a PPD file on their site (or a
driver package containing the PPD).

Are you using Fedora or Red Hat? These distros do not deliver you any
manufacturer-supplied PPD (in contrary to Mandriva and SuSE), the
printconf-gui also does not support ready-built PPDs, but only the
Foomatic XML database. So you need to put the Lexmark PPD into
/usr/share/cups/model, "killall -HUP cupsd", and then use the KDE
Printing Manager or the CUPS web interface to set up a print queue.

On linuxprinting.org I will do a better integration of
manufacturer-supplied PPD files soon, so that they get more easily
packageable for distros, more easily maintainable, automatically being
used by the Foomatic tools, and if only a PPD file is submitted to
linuxprinting.org, a printer entry in the database will be generated
automatically.

Till

Post by Anonymous
...
*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"
..
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "cat %A%Z"

OK, REMOVE THIS JUNK!
Just use the standard PPD file. Foomatic causes far more problems
than it solves...

*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 foomatic-rip"
..
*FoomaticRIPCommandLine: "level=%D; printf "%%!\n%%%% %%%%\n%C&qu&&
" -dLanguageLevel=$level"; else level=""; fi; gs -&&
q -dPARANOIDSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pswrite$level%A%Z -sOutpu&&
tFile=- -; else cat; fi"
I am not sure how to decipher all those if-s but from what I see in the output (when the device is set to a file instead of the printer), for PS jobs it just cat-s them. So the original problem with the job end persists unless I manually add
/bin/echo -en "\004";
just before the last 'fi' in the above command line.
Michal

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Johannes Meixner

2005-05-13 13:43:51 UTC

Hello,

a bit off topic...

... if only a PPD file is submitted to linuxprinting.org,
a printer entry in the database will be generated automatically.

Great!
I assume it works based upon the manufacturer and model strings
and therefore it would work even for non-PostScript printer PPDs
in particular for Foomatic-compatible PPDs which are external
generated (e.g. at printer manufacturers)?

Foomatic causes far more problems than it solves...

I disagree.

Without Foomatic we would not have switched to CUPS when we did it
because when we switched to CUPS, it was Foomatic which provided
the same support for all those various kind of cheap little inkjet
printers which had worked before with the various kind of Ghostscript
drivers (up to the various weird postfilters).

One might call Foomatic a (perhaps complicated) workaround for
a native CUPS driver but I think it is much better to accept such
a workaround than having no support at all when there is no native
CUPS driver available.

Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner

--
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5 Mail: jsmeix-***@public.gmane.org
90409 Nuernberg, Germany WWW: http://www.suse.de/

Michael Sweet

2005-05-13 14:55:17 UTC

Post by Johannes Meixner
Hello,
a bit off topic...

... if only a PPD file is submitted to linuxprinting.org,
a printer entry in the database will be generated automatically.

FWIW, we already have this in place on the CUPS site, and the PPD
database is available via Subversion...

http://www.cups.org/ppd.php
http://svn.easysw.com/public/ppd/trunk/

Post by Johannes Meixner

Foomatic causes far more problems than it solves...

I agree that Foomatic helps for older printers that are only supported
via a Ghostscript-based driver, however the current version also
attempts to support all PostScript printers, too, and often leads to
problems... All you have to do is look at the number of problems
people report in the Foomatic drivers vs. say the sample drivers in
CUPS or the native Gimp/Gutenprint drivers.

In short, I liked Foomatic when it was a reliable wrapper for non-PS
Ghostscript drivers. It did one thing, and it did it well.

--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software http://www.easysw.com

Michael Sweet

2005-05-13 11:36:34 UTC

Post by Michal Szymanski
...
What do you mean by 'standard PPD'? I am also exprimenting with my
printer (Lexmark T430) configured as T616 (closest entry in the

By "standard PPD", I mean the vendor's original PPD file, not the
Foomatic version. You'll find this on the Windows driver CD that
came with the printer.

--
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software http://www.easysw.com

Michal Szymanski

2005-05-13 07:51:23 UTC

Post by Helge Blischke