[H-GEN] Printer Jiggery Pokery

[Anthony Towns]

On Thu, Oct 29, 1998 at 05:04:47PM +1000, Michael Anthon wrote:
> I have a desire to do some strange things with printer devices.  What I
> would like to do is to set up a printer device that will pop up an X
> window somewhere (preferably on the X terminal sitting on my desk) and
> show whatever was printed (all nicely formatted of course).

You don't need to setup a device to do this -- just a filter that
runs gv or whatever. If you're using RedHat, the easiest way is probably
to setup a remote Samba printer and change the script /etc/printcap
refers to to one of your own creation that runs ghostview over the
incoming file. 

You probably want to be a little careful to ensure you run magicfilter
over the file first, so it is postscript, rather than a jpg or plain
text or whatever, which will probably require some fiddling.

You'll also want to be careful that X is running, and consider what 
to do if someone telnet'ed into your machine tries to print -- should
that distract you or fail silently, or do something else? I'm not
sure off hand if filter scripts run as the user or root, but I suspect
they can at least be made to run as the user.

FWIW, HTH, etc.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.

``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
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