Re: terminal only for two weeks

Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> writes:

On 2025-01-16, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

>
 > I suspect I imagine wrong how things actually work.  I thought
 > perhaps there would be a command line such as ``lpr --pages 7-14''.
>
As has already been pointed in this thread, CUPS, a fairly
common choice for a printer spooler in GNU/Linux systems,
provides lp(1) command that does have just such an option.

Thanks for the information.  It turns out I'm not being able to print
two-sided-long-edge with CUPS and my Brother HL-L2360DW.  I resorted to
using /etc/printcap and lpd's lpr (not CUPS's lpr) because I can then
set my printer to always do two-sided-long-edge, which is nearly 100% of
the way I print.

 > Now I believe a program like evince generates a PostScript of
 > the pages you asked it to and then sends this complete PostScript
 > document of the pages you requested to a pipe or file on disk
 > that lpr sends to the printer.
>
AIUI, traditional lpd(8) / lpr(1) do require the file to be
preprocessed in such a way before it is submitted for printing,
but even then, they do /not/ require for the file to be
PostScript: it's possible to setup the respective filters to
accept other formats, such as PDF.

That's what I did as well.  I use a filter called ps2pcl.

lp|remote|brother|Brother HL-L2360DW:\
  :lp=9100@BRWB052162167A6:\
  :if=/usr/local/libexec/ps2pcl:\
  :sh:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:\
  :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:

But today I learned that the Brother HL-L2360DW supports PostScript and
I was able to set it up that way with CUPS.  I just don't use because I
never want two-sided-short-edge or one-sided, which is all I can get
with CUPS for whatever reason.

 > So, if qpdf doesn't do the same, I'm out of luck in terms of
 > printing with lpr.  But I think I can find a program that takes
 > page ranges and transformations like scaling and produces a
 > PostScript document that I can send to lpr, so I can use qpdfview
 > and use the command line to print stuff out.
>
I'm not too familiar with qpdf(1) (and I don't think I've ever
used qpdfview [*]), but it does have a --pages option.  E. g.:

Turns out qpdfview is a pretty usable PDF viewer and it's the one I'm
using the most here.  I think qpdfview is the closest thing to
SumatraPDF (on Windows), my favorite.

$ qpdf --empty --pages in.pdf 5-8 -- out.pdf
$ qpdf  in.pdf --pages . 5-8 -- out.pdf

Thanks!  That works.

(The second variant preserves the input document metadata,
which isn't probably of much use for printing anyway.)

Good to know.  Sometimes we produce PDF for screen viewing.

... A somewhat little-known fact is that once uncompressed, PDF
is largely a text file (perhaps unsurprising, given it comes
from the same company that created PostScript), though employing
byte offsets rather unrestrictedly.
>
qpdf(1) has a --qdf option that undoes compressesion and annotates
the file in such a way that the companion fix-qdf program can
fix the byte offsets, at least in certain cases, thus allowing the
PDF file to be edited with a text editor.  (Though probably using
a library, such as PDF::API2 for Perl, would be more practical
than trying to, say, adapt sed(1) for automated edits in this case.)

You seem to know a lot about PostScript.  So here's a question.  When I
want to print two-sided-long-edge, is that a command included in the
PostScript document itself (and then sent to the printer)?