Re: [tlug] Laser printer for Linux

[Benjamin Tayehanpour <benjamin@example.com>]

On Fri, 21 Nov 2014 13:58:19 -0200
"SCHWARTZ, Fernando G." <fgs@example.com> wrote:

> > An interesting side note: HP (and thus sometimes Brother, since some Brother printers have a feature called "HP emulation") network printers have a feature known as JetDirect. I'm not sure about the whole potential of this protocol, but essentially you can netcat a Postscript file directly to TCP port 9100 on the printer. Which is neat in a number of ways.  
> 
> Yes, yes, yes. They're all at the " hplip " package. One of the first
> packages I often install @ work. Try that at a recent distro tough.

Not sure whether you just accidentally quoted the wrong passage or you truly missed my point. HPLIP has nothing whatsoever to do with the thing I'm describing in the quote. The point being that no driver is needed for simple printing, as long as you're able to generate Postscript and send packets over the network. I've printed from my smartphone, from Raspberry Pies, &c., all with standard command-line tools and *without* a vendor-supplied printer driver.

As a real-world example, I've used this to make my own "cloud printing" of sorts. A simple shell script (using inotify, pandoc and a few other odds and ends) keeps watch over a directory on my server. Whenever a document appears in this folder, it converts it to Postscript and pipes it over the network to the printer using netcat. No driver required, just a few lines of scripting which could be run on anything, really.

Another real-world example is when I'm using someone else's computer, don't have root access, and need to print something (not very uncommon at uni, for instance). No need for drivers, just throw a Postscript file at the right network port! I wish all printing was this simple.

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