Re: Printing Japanese

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> I am unable to print using lpr.  I can print if I cat to
    Craig> /dev/lp1.

[snip]
    Craig> It looks like it is ignoring my printcap or something...

I had some problems with lpd, with very similar symptoms.  I don't
remember how I fixed it; I think that I simply lprm'd everything I
could, and then killed the daemon, rm -rf'd all the /var/spool/lp*
(more violent than necessary, but I wanted the system to know who was
boss ;-), recreated the relevant spool directory, and restarted the
daemon.  I think there was something screwy in the status and or lock
files.  Note that it could be either the lpd.lock file or the
printer-specific lock file that might be screwy.

I also recall that for some reason multiple instances of the daemon
would appear in ps aux.  This doesn't happen now, and I don't know why 
it did.

The lpd suite does not work as advertised in the manuals (at least not
the old Slackware versions I have).  In particular, I don't think that
lpc actually talks to the lpd process at all.  It seems to just
manipulate the status of the lock files.  At least, the start and stop
commands don't touch a running lpd.

For what it's worth, here is my configuration:

crw-rw----   1 root     lp         6,   1 Dec  1  1993 /dev/lp1
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root         4741 Dec  2 13:04 /etc/printcap
drwxrwxr-x   2 root     lp           1024 Dec  2 13:11 /var/spool/lp1
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root            5 Dec  2 13:17 /var/spool/lp1/lock
-rw-rw-r--   1 root     root           18 Dec  2 13:17 /var/spool/lp1/status
drwxrwxr-x   2 root     lp           1024 Oct  6  1995 /var/spool/lpd
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root            5 Dec  2 13:10 /var/spool/lpd/lpd.lock

#	@(#)etc.printcap	5.2 (Berkeley) 5/5/88
#
# Generic printer:
# (Actually, this is a TI microLaser PS running in HP LJ II emulation mode;
# I'm doing such a silly thing because the PS is level 1 and so can't
# handle composite fonts, nor output from recent versions of dvips.
# Yes, dvipsk 5.58f does kanji, at least under NTT JTeX.)
lp:lp=/dev/lp1:sd=/usr/spool/lp1:sh

You do have exactly one lpd running, don't you?  (lpc won't
necessarily tell if not if my suspicions are correct.)

You haven't done something silly like I did, which was to compile lp
support as a module and then not load it?  (I guess not since
">/dev/lp1" works, but you never can tell.)

Your input filter "/var/spool/lpd/myprinter/input_filter" does exist
and is executable by the owner or group of the lpd process?

Note that the documentation says that the lock file doesn't need to be 
removed if something goes wrong, but my experience suggests otherwise.

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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