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Printing FAQ

Mixing Synchronics and Realworld or other mixed marriages

Sometimes mixing more than one program causes printer grief because one program adds form feeds to its reports and the other does not, so you have a nasty problem. It's usually not all that hard to fix, though; here's what I did for one customer with that problem:

Synchronics spooled printers are defined in the "synsuppl" file in the Synchronics directory (same thing on RealWorld but file is "run80r"). These take the form of:

 dd_printername="lp -s -dhpjet5"; export dd_printername
 

What I did was add "-o syn" to each line:

 dd_printername="lp -s -o syn -dhpjet5"; export
 dd_printername
 

Next, I modified the interface scripts. For the hpjet printers, these are found in the directory /usr/spool/lp/admins/lp/interfaces/model.orig/ Each file there is the script that print jobs are processed by. Within the scripts, the options are extracted by a section that begins:

 
 for i in $5
 do
        case "$i" in
 
        -postscript | postscript)
                format="PS"
                outputmode="raw";;
 
 

I added a test for "syn" to this:

 for i in $5
 do
        case "$i" in
 
        syn)
                outputmode="raw" ;
                FILTER="sed '$d'";
                SYN="true";;
                
                
        -postscript | postscript)
                format="PS"
                outputmode="raw";;
 
 
 

Therefore the script acts this way ONLY if "-o syn" is used, which will only be for Synchronics. Further on in the script, I added a section that tests for $SYN being true, and there I set the lines per page to 66. Finally, the FILTER setting above deletes the very last line of the report, which contains an extra form feed I don't think we want. To disable this, just change

        syn)
 
 
 to
 
        notsyn)
 
 
 

You might also be interested in RealWorld Printer Script by Bruce Baumann

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