Perhaps I'm Going A Little Too Far For A Pda... Options

[iamasmith]

Oh my, I only had to builde xfprint and espgs (they aren't in ports) and I have a full local printing system working..

lpr output to my Epson Stylus photo... (including typo of lpw instead of lpq when trying to do things in a rush )
 xfce1.jpg ( 57.68K ) Number of downloads: 326


Starting to print from AbiWord
 xfce2.jpg ( 55.33K ) Number of downloads: 220


AbiWord documents queued (shown in xfprint-manager)
 xfce3.jpg ( 65.27K ) Number of downloads: 170


CUPS spooler history
 xfce4.jpg ( 57.96K ) Number of downloads: 212


This stuff rocks and is obviously great if you are in a bind and need to print something somewhere... a couple of pointers though if you are going to build these addon bits..

xfprint requires a2ps so be sure to install that from the ports first

espgs (ESP Ghostscript) is required for local despooling... you must make sure that you install the jpeg and libpng sources locally into the build tree before building

I used 'gmake' and 'gmake install' to get them installed on my Z... have found that a lot of this stuff has GNU'isms in the makefiles.

- Andy

[iamasmith]

I have to say that although I built all this (partly from ports and partly non ports based stuff) it's not exactly ideal to run this sort of thing on a PDA.

This is a full blown CUPS system that renders plain text documents into postscript (using a2ps), spools them, despools them into a rasteriser and converts them into an output printer stream. This is exactly what happends on your desktop *nix box and the memory requirements are quite heavy.

As an example from the start of the lpr command to finish it took about 40 seconds... (for 3 lines of text).

The AbiWord document, interestingly took about the same time but had 1inch high text in it so there was a lot of softfont stuff going on.

I suppose it would be nice to have this in a standard PDA but CUPS may be considered a little too resource intensive for a piece of consumder software in a PDA

- Andy

[adf]

printing from the z would be cool..... but how often will you actually have a z and a printer and no means other than the z to get the file to the printer?

On the other hand... I guess i'd do it if it were possible.

is cups the only realistic option?

[iamasmith]

printing from the z would be cool.....  but how often will you actually have a z and a printer and no means other than the z to get the file to the printer?

On the other hand...  I guess i'd do it if it were possible.

is cups the only realistic option?

No you can, by default use BSD lpr/lpd which it in the base OS, however, if you want non postscript drivers then CUPS is the way to go... heh, if I have enough time I may even leave the thing to build Gutenprint driver set so I can print to my Canon CP710 (using CP100 driver in Gutenprint).

- Andy