Re: Use network printer from NetBSD

[Robert Nestor <rnestor%mac.com@localhost>]

On my old Brother HL-1270N I found I had to append a “\004” to the end of any file sent to the printer to get it to print.  This was true for plain text as well as Postscript files.  The printer has different internal “queues” for plain text and Postscript so I wrote a simple filter that convetred plain text files into Postscript using enscript  and sent everything to the POSTSCRIPT_P1 queue on the printer.

I now use a newer Brother HL-3230CDW that has the same setups but i’ve discovered I don’t need to append anything to either type of files to get them to print and the printer is smart enough to handle both plain text and Postscript regardless of which internal queue the file is sent to, so I don’t need any special handling anymore.

The printer on my local network is named “patches” at a fixed address of 192.168.1.2 and my /etc/printcap entry is:

lp|patches:\
         :sh:lp=:mx#0:rm=patches:rp=TEXT_P1:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:\
         :sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:

Hope this helps,
-bob