CUPS

[Nobody's Hero]

I am running RedHat9. I am unfamiliar with CUPS, printing. I am trying to pass PCL commands to the printer. like "lp -o options"
How do I pass, for example the PCL command -onb or something to a printer? Can someone help me with this?

[Rick Garland]

Most of the printer configuration I see with CUPS takes place inside of the administrative web pages of CUPS.

Example, for 'no banner'

http://localhost:631
login as appropriate
click on the 'Manage Printer'
click on the 'Configure Printer' radio button of the specific printer you wish to work with.

There is an option in there for Banner.

[Nobody's Hero]

I was just using 'no banner' as an example. There are many PCL options that I need to use. Not sure how I do this. I am sure the PCL has been integrated but I don't know how to do it.

[Rick Garland]

The printer driver files for cups have the *.ppd extension.

The driver files that you have loaded on the OS reside in /usr/share/cups/model.

The driver files in use for defined printers would reside in /etc/cups/ppd.

Looking through these driver files it appears that the options are passed through via web interface.

I do not see the -o option in there. But I'm sure you can modify the driver file(s) to make the changes.

[Rick Garland]

A good looking site I just found;
http://www.linuxprinting.org

Has multiple printer and driver info

[Rick Garland]

Another new bit of info;

Found this web site
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_computing/buns/unix_printing.html#SECTION0500

If I submit a job using the 'lpr' command, I can get to the various options the driver can support.

Example, to print landscape
lpr -P -olandscape

Also works,
lpr -P -oduplex
lpr -P -onobanner

Ultimately, depends on the capabilities of you driver.

[Bill Thorsteinson]

CUPS is a postscript based print server.
It generally converts the print job to
postscript and then to PCL if required.

I would not expect it to accept the PCL
commands as options to the print request.
Depending on the PDD file is has a very
good idea of the capabilities of the printer.
These are exended by the capablilities
offered by rendering the document into
postscript before final output.

If you are using the default lp command,
you should investigate the cups replacement.
The cups options are differnt see:
http://www.cups.org/docs-1.1/sum.html

landscape should be "lp -o landscape file".