From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 27 21:08:33 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 97DD5106564A for ; Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:08:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rfg@tristatelogic.com) Received: from outgoing.tristatelogic.com (segfault.tristatelogic.com [69.62.255.118]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 790848FC13 for ; Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:08:33 +0000 (UTC) Received: from segfault-nmh-helo.tristatelogic.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by segfault.tristatelogic.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id D2027BDC34 for ; Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:08:31 -0700 (PDT) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <20111027143609.60335.qmail@joyce.lan> Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:08:31 -0700 Message-ID: <23529.1319749711@tristatelogic.com> From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Subject: Re: Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:08:33 -0000 In message <20111027143609.60335.qmail@joyce.lan>, you wrote: >I'm not a huge fan of CUPS, but at this point it's the best of a bad >lot. I find the queueing useful, since I often print documents long >enough that I don't want to wait. I don't quite understand the issue you are raising john. Even with my direct-to-/dev/{u}lpt0 approach, if I needed to print a really big file, I would just start the print in one window and then minimize that one and continue on working in my other windows. I mean in what way would one need to "wait"? >>More importantly, CUPS, for me at least, seems to be quite slow. >>There's a loooooooong pause after I queue something for printing >>until something actually comes out of the printer. > >Yeah. I have a similar printer with a similar problem. I believe >that what's going on is that the current version of CUPS tells all the >clients to print to PDF, then for printers that don't handle PDF, >converts that to postcript using ghostscript which is very, very slow. Huh?? John are you saying that my documents, some of which *start out* as .PS files, are converted by CUPS to .PDF and thence (since I don't have any printers that speak PDF) the document is then converted *back* to Postscript for actual printing?? If so, I can sure see why the multiple pointless conversion would indeed take up a lot of time. >I think this is a bug. If it is, then I think it may be a long-standing one. I did something very like what I just described doing on FreeBSD 8.2 also back on my old FreeBSD 7.0 system which I first installed maybe three years of more ago. I can't really remember anymore if I did it primarily for speed reasons or because (as now) I just didn't want to have to go thru all fo the falderall of properly configuring CUPS, but I suspect it was both. Regards, rfg