> I don't think that's even supposed to work.  I think the if is used to
> track usage if I read the man page correctly.

if _does_ work, but lpd doesn't run if when you're using a remote printer.

> I had this exact problem.  What you have to do is create two printers
> in your termcap.  One is a raw interface to the remote filter (seemingly
> the only kind possible) and the other is an interface to a pseudo device
> with your filter as the output filter.  Your filter should in turn write
> to the first printer - the raw one to the remote printer.  I just used
> popen("/usr/bin/lpr -P lj5si", "w") where lj5si was the remote printer.

Yes, I heard this is the proper solution (and it works).  I created a
wrapper script for my filter.  This wrapper captures the output of the
filter and pipes it into 'lpr -Praw_printer'.

> One issue is the name of the lp device.  /dev/null would be the
> obvious choice but I haven't looked at lpd to figure out what it does
> for locking.  If it ises the lp device name then you may have a problem.
> I sidestepped the whole issue by using /dev/lp.lj5si.

/dev/null seems to work just fine.

> > Besides, if you have a comment in /etc/printcap ending with backslash,
> > it seems to confuse lpr/lprm/lpq.  This _is_ a bug, isn't it? ;)
> 
> What's a comment?   :-)

Aren't the lines starting with '#' comments in /etc/printcap? :-)

  -jm