I'm curious how anyone working with Debian is setting up their laser printers. Typically under Linux I've used the following:

connection: socket://x.x.x.x
make: generic
model: generic text only
options: send CRLF for LF

With that, I can embed HP PCL sequences (like ESC &k2S for condensed fixed pitch) in the file and get the desired output.

Experimenting now with Debian 12, the only way I can get the PCL ESC sequences to be recognized is to add the -o raw option to the lpr command line. But that defeats the CRLF option, requiring that the print files use embedded CRLF terminators. That can be accomplished by adding OPTIONS=CRLF to the miame.ini (and probably CRNL = TRUE in the INI.VUE). This method also generates a complaint from CUPS which you set it up that generic / raw printing is deprecated and may be discontinued in the future. But without the -o raw switch, any of the non-generic printer/driver options seem to ignore PCL ESC codes.

All of these details can be ignored if you use AUXLOC: printing and let ATE and/or APEX handle printing from the Windows side, but sometimes it makes more sense to print directly on the UNIX side (particularly for background reports).

So I'm wondering what approach others are using.

Hi Jack,

We have a program that initially templates the printers.conf file. Once cups reprocesses it, this is what one of the entries in it looks like:

The PQI file is setup like this:


This approach has not changed for us since migrating from CentOS 7.

That's pretty much identical to mine, except that mike has a MakeModel Generic Text-Only Printer entry.

More questions:

1. How does yours appear in the CUPS web interface? Mine looks like this:


2. Are you embedding PCL sequences in print files (e.g. condensed print, lines per inch, etc.)?

3. Do your print files have CRLF line terminators (or just LF)?

4. Can you email me the prt01.ppd file that it generated? (I think that's where the rubber really meets the road here.)

Thanks!

It looks like this in the web interface:

Files we print with CUPS to a laser contain embedded PCL5 escape sequences (except for some that are set up with a driver at one specific customer.)
Files are sent to XCALL SPOOL with LF endings.
There is no prt01.ppd in /etc/cups/ppd/. Perhaps because we are adding them via printers.conf.

Ok thanks for the info. My issue may be the ppd file, which was apparently auto-generated as I experimented with different driver settings. And/or the driver (although I've traditionally used the Generic / Text Only combination without difficulty and without needing -o raw or manually generated CRLFs.)

I'll try your approach and otherwise continue experimenting and report back any significant findings.

Thanks again!

OK, sounds good. I am not sure if our approach is correct, but it does work.

Installing the printer by just adding a set of entries like your example to the printers.conf does succeed in creating the printer without a PPD file. But that printer had the same behavior as before. So it's not clear that the PPD is doing anything.

While playing with this, at some point I realized that my lpr command was actually just a link to lp, which has somewhat different behavior (and doesn't like the -# switch for copies). So I unlinked it and then installed cups-bsd which includes its own lpr....

That still didn't fix the CRLF issue. I tried adjusting the default CUPS options for the printer, i.e. setting Characters to send for a New Line option to either Carriage Return and Line Feed (CR + LF) (DOS/Windows style) or Line Feed (LF) only (Unix/Linux style) but that didn't seem to make any difference either.

For now I'm ok with either relying on the physical printer's own setup options to handle the LF/CRLF issue (which I'm guessing may be what you've done), or just activating the CRLF option in A-Shell. Or creating a print filter.

But one critical detail that your example revealed: despite the documentation suggesting that the lpr -l switch is equivalent to the -o raw switch, with lpr -l the PCL commands work, while in -o raw, they didn't.

So for anyone struggling with CUPS under Debian, the recipe that worked for me is:

• Use the /localhost:631 web interface to add the printer. Use the socket://ipaddr or socket://ipaddr:9100 interface. Select Generic as the make, and Generic Text-Only as the model. (Alternatively, just create a <printer>...</printer> definition text file (similar to the one John listed above) and add it manually to your /etc/cups/printers.conf file. (You might have to restart CUPS for it to recognize a printer added that way.)
• In the printer init file, use DEVICE = ptrname -l
• Either configure the printer to convert LF to CRLF, or add the OPTIONS=CRLF option to the miame.ini file.

With that you can embed PCL codes in the print files. Note that if you are converting from a dot matrix printer to laser, you may need to create an A-Shell print filter SBX to convert from the dot matrix commands to PCL equivalents. If so you may find the OKI2PCL module in the SOSLIB helpful, either as is, or as a starting point for your own converter.

If your print command doesn't generate an error but also doesn't print, check the OPR:SPOOL.LOG file, which is where you'll see the actual lpr command line and any error messages.