On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 10:06:57AM -0600, Lucas Bergman wrote: > > As a physicist I wrote large programs in Pascal before retiring in > > 1994 but nothing since until last week. I thought of a problem I > > wanted to solve, read up on C++ and got my program working with only > > a few struggles with syntax but how to write directly to the printer > > has eluded me. > > This has little to do with C++; it is instead a question of operating > environment. I'll assume that you want to print portably on Unix-like > operating systems. > > The Right Thing on Unix for printing is to execute "lpr" in a child > process, and write PostScript down a pipe to that process' standard > input. See fork(2), pipe(2), execvp(3), and lpr(1). Bonus points for > allowing the user to configure the arguments you pass to lpr so they > can, e.g., print to a different printer with an lpr that doesn't > understand the PRINTER environment variable. > > Most Unix programs do exactly this. It is up to the user to ensure > that feeding PostScript to lpr does the right thing, even on > non-PostScript printers. > > > I know when I wrote those Pascal programs I distributed them to > > people with different printers. The programs could check printer > > capabilities and print excellent graphs if they found a postscript > > printer. I haven't the foggiest recollection of how I programed > > this. > > There are probably ways to do this if your users have a more advanced > printing system like CUPS installed, but most don't. > > > If this question is regarded as wildly off target for this list, for > > the record I tried a Google search... > > It's probably off topic, but not wildly so. > > Hope this helps, > Lucas > -- > Lucas Bergman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thank you, this clears up my misunderstanding of the references. Tom George > Tired of getting duplicate copies of mailing list messages? I respect > the 'mail-followup-to' header field: http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
