2004/08/12 foomatic,magicfilter

Print filters. Whether it's CUPS, LPRng or plain old LPD, you often need a filter in between application data and the physical printer. In olden times, you'd use specific filters for specific purposes, but the trend now is to Swiss army knife, do everything filters that consult config files or databases to determine their actions (which is often just calling Ghostscript with appropriate options).
http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/magicfilter/
http://www.linuxprinting.org/foomatic.html.

With some older lpd's (SCO's, for example), you couldn't specify a filter. We'd get around that by fronting with a Sys V printer where you could use a filter - an "interface script" that would end by sending to the lpd printer. More modern lpd's let you specify a "if=" line in printcap.

You can use your own filter scripts with CUPS, too, but you have to work within a "ppd" file. You just create the printer normally, but then change things. Your contribution would be a line added to the .ppd file that might look like:

*cupsFilter: "text/plain 0 MyFilter"
 

You'd create MyFilter in /usr/lib/cups/filter/ and the ppd file would be /etc/cups/ppd/queue-name.ppd

Got something to add? Send me email.

More Articles by Tony Lawrence

Find me on Google+

© 2011-07-06 Tony Lawrence

---

Printer Friendly Version

Site map     |      Disclaimer

foomatic,magicfilter Copyright © August 2004 Tony Lawrence

Have you tried Searching this site?

Support Rates

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more.

Contact us

Printer Friendly Version