A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

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Printing FAQ

How can I print from Netscape without a Postscript printer?

If you don't have a Postscript printer, you might be able to use Ghostscript (available from SCO's Skunkware Page ) to get some functionality. Ghostscript is slow and has had a few problems now and then, but you might find that you can live with it.

You can install ghostscript from the Skunkware CD; don't forget that you also need the Glib (Graphics Library) package.

To see the printers that ghostscript supports, type

gs -?

You may have to experiment a bit to find out what works best with your printer; for example I found that "ljet4" was good for my LaserJet 6L. I suggest that you create a simple Postscript file for testing:

echo "testing" | text2post > /tmp/test.ps

so that you don't get page after page of junk if your first try doesn't work.

My script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/gs -q -sDEVICE=ljet4 -r600 -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sOutputFile="-" - | lp -dlaser -o raw

I call that "webprint", and once you've told Netscape to use it instead of "lp",that's what continues to pop up in the Netscape print dialog.

Or, you can get fancy and build gs support into your interface script, even to the point of automatically recognizing Postscript files. That can be a little tricky, and really has no advantage over the shell script, but some people like to do it that way.

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