Hello all,
the original request was for a printcap entry for an HP DeskJet and
usage of ghostscript under DU to print Postscript automatically.
I am pleased to report that Paul A. Schoenly <pschoen_at_janus.gsfc.nasa.gov>
kindly provided me with a set of filters from magicfilter pre-compiled
for DU.
During installation of magicfilter, version 1.2 + patches from the
Debian Linux distribution, all available from any good mirror of the
main site:
ftp.debian.org/pub/debian/dists/hamm/hamm/source/text/magicfilter*
I discovered an interesting problem: Ghostscript 5.01 does not like to
be called as a filter without a controlling tty. For example using
gs [options] -sOutputFile=- - to get Ghostscript to read in from stdin
and output to stdout works with version 4.x but *not* with version 5.x
unless called from a shell prompt.
The fix is to change the magicfilter filter files from using the
keyword "filter" to "ffilter" and changing the output to be $FILE as
opposed to stdout. This simple change fixes the obscure SIGFPE which
is otherwise obtained when printing.
Using apsfilter 4.9.1 failed miserably and porting it seems more pain
than it is worth given that magicfilter works fine. Also, note that
you can then throw at your DeskJet anything you want, including DVI
files, TIFF images, GZIPped files etc. All auto-converted by the
filter! :-)
Hope this helps,
Arrigo
--
Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo_at_albourne.com>
Albourne Partners Ltd. - London, UK
Received on Fri Sep 18 1998 - 11:33:33 NZST