Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 09:18:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: Will Andrews <andrews@technologist.com>, papowell@astart.com, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: was: Bringing LPRng into FreeBSD? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006300908330.4585-100000@picnic.mat.net> In-Reply-To: <v0421012fb581cfdf2938@[128.113.24.47]>
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On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, Garance A Drosihn wrote: > I'm a bit spaced out right now, but offhand I don't see why > ghostscript would be needed for converting anything (except > PDF) into postscript. I suspect apsfilter only uses it for > printing postscript jobs on non-postscript printers, or for > doing clever manipulation of postscript (for page-counting, > perhaps). I would be inclined to use something like netpbm > to get GIF images INTO postscript. Not ghostscript. > > [this says nothing about how much stuff lprng or apsfilter > brings in, of course. I'm just not sure why one would fire > up ghostscript to print gif images...] Because postscript printers only print postscript, and not gif. You need some method of changing your input format (whatever it is) to postscript. You need that capability for every format that you want to print. Using apsfilter (which sizes out on the distribution file at around 220K, I think) I can send just about any format I want to directly to lp, and it DTRT. No flags, it just DTRT. Will's comments about apsfilter being such a beast confuse me, because the LPRng distribution sizes out (compressed, just like the size I gave for the apsfilter dist) at 1.7M. I can't tell for sure what it's capabilities are, but I don't think it has either the features or the small size of apsfilter (which is all shell scripts anyhow). So, apsfilter requires that you have in your machine tools to do that conversion for you. It isn't fussy, it will let you choose some (it wants a2ps for text conversion to postscript, but it'll take enscript, I think, too). It wants the same kinda thing for jpeg, for gif, etc, etc. The shell scripts just manage the dispatch of everything for you. Also, LPRng requires gmake. Going to be a nice bit of work, bmaking that fellow. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include C & Java programming, FreeBSD, chuckr@picnic.mat.net | electronics, communications, and signal processing. New Year's Resolution: I will not sphroxify gullible people into looking up fictitious words in the dictionary. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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