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The Linux Printing HOWTO

Grant Taylor

     gtaylor+pht@picante.com
    

Version $Revision: 5.4 $, $Date: 2000/07/12 04:34:46 $

This is the Linux Printing HOWTO, a collection of information on how to generate, preview, print and fax anything under Linux (and other Unices in general).


Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. History
1.2. Copyright
2. How to print
2.1. With PDQ
2.2. With LPD and the lpr command
3. Kernel printer devices
3.1. The lp device (kernels <=2.1.32)
3.2. The parport device (kernels >= 2.1.33)
3.3. Serial devices
3.4. USB Devices
4. Supported Printers
4.1. Postscript
4.2. Non-Postscript
4.3. What printers work?
4.4. How to buy a printer
5. Which spooling software?
5.1. PDQ
5.2. LPRng
5.3. PPR
5.4. CUPS
6. How it all works
6.1. PDQ
6.2. LPD
7. How to set things up
7.1. Configuring PDQ
7.2. Configuring LPD
7.3. Large Installations
7.4. Accounting
8. Vendor Solutions
8.1. Red Hat
8.2. Debian
8.3. SuSE
8.4. Caldera
8.5. Corel
8.6. Other Distributions
9. Ghostscript.
9.1. Invoking Ghostscript
9.2. Ghostscript output tuning
10. How to print to a printer over the network
10.1. To a Unix/lpd host
10.2. To a Win95, WinNT, LanManager, or Samba printer
10.3. To a NetWare Printer
10.4. To an EtherTalk (Apple) printer
10.5. To an HP or other ethernet printer
10.6. Running an if for remote printers with old LPDs
10.7. From Windows.
10.8. From an Apple.
10.9. From Netware.
11. Windows-only printers
11.1. The Ghostscript Windows redirector
11.2. HP Winprinters
11.3. Lexmark Winprinters
12. How to print to a fax machine.
12.1. Using a faxmodem
12.2. Using the Remote Printing Service
12.3. Commercial Faxing Services
13. How to generate something worth printing.
13.1. Markup languages
13.2. WYSIWYG Word Processors
14. Printing Photographs
14.1. Ghostscript and Photos
14.2. Paper
14.3. Printer Settings
14.4. Print Durability
14.5. Shareware and Commercial Software
15. On-screen previewing of printable things.
15.1. PostScript
15.2. TeX dvi
15.3. Adobe PDF
16. Serial printers under lpd
16.1. Setting up in printcap
16.2. Older serial printers that drop characters
17. Credits
Index

1. Introduction

The Printing HOWTO should contain everything you need to know to help you set up printing services on your Linux box(en). As life would have it, it's a bit more complicated than in the point-and-click world of Microsoft and Apple, but it's also a bit more flexible and certainly easier to administer for large LANs.

This document is structured so that most people will only need to read the first half or so. Most of the more obscure and situation-dependent information in here is in the last half, and can be easily located in the Table of Contents, whereas most of the information through section 8 or 9 is probably needed by most people.

Since version 3.x is a complete rewrite, some information from previous editions has been lost. This is by design, as the previous HOWTOs were so large as to be 60 typeset pages, and had the narrative flow of a dead turtle. If you do not find your answers here, you are encouraged to a) look on the Linux Printing Website and b) drop me a note saying what ought to be here but isn't.

The Linux Printing Website is a good place to find the latest version; it is also, of course, distributed from Metalab (metalab.unc.edu) and your friendly local LDP mirror.

1.1. History

This is the fourth generation of the Printing HOWTO. The history of the PHT may be chronicled thusly:

  1. I wrote the printing-howto in 1992 in response to too many printing questions in comp.os.linux, and posted it. This predated the HOWTO project by a few months and was the first FAQlet called a `howto'. This edition was in plain ascii.

  2. After joining the HOWTO project, the Printing-HOWTO was merged with an Lpd FAQ by Brian McCauley <B.A.McCauley@bham.ac.uk>; we continued to co-author the PHT for two years or so. At some point we incorporated the work of Karl Auer <Karl.Auer@anu.edu.au>. This generation of the PHT was in TeXinfo, and available in PS, HTML, Ascii, and Info.

  3. After letting the PHT rot and decay for over a year, and an unsuccessful attempt at getting someone else to maintain it, this rewrite happened. This generation of the PHT is written in SGML using the LinuxDoc DTD and the SGML-Tools-1 package. Beginning with version 3.27, it incorporates a summary of a companion printer support database; before 3.27 there was never a printer compatability list in this HOWTO (!).

  4. In mid-January, 2000, I found out about the PDQ print "spooler". PDQ provides a printing mechanism so much better than lpd ever did that I spent several hours playing with it, rewrote parts of this HOWTO, and bumped the version number of the document to 4.

  5. In mid-2000, I moved my printing website to www.linuxprinting.org, and began offering more powerful configuration tools there. I also converted the HOWTO to DocBook, and initiated coverate of CUPS, LPRng, and GPR/libppd.

1.2. Copyright

This document is Copyright (c) 1992-2000 by Grant Taylor. Feel free to copy and redistribute this document according to the terms of the GNU General Public License, revision 2 or later.