current state of HP laserjet + lp + lpr

[rbriber at POLY1.NIST.GOV]

I sent mail requesting help on setting up our HP laserjet + with our
4D25 (3.3.1) and received mostly requests for information from other
people.  Mike Sweet sent a nice filter program for controlling the
HP printer, reading from stdin and writing to stdout.   So far the
situation is as follows.

When the HPLJ is on the PI's parrallel port then lp seems to work fine.  But
lpr fails, printing out garbled files.  If I process the files with Mr. Sweet's
filter lpr works ok, but then the printer is set to an unusual state and
lp prints spaces between the lines, etc.  Instead if I connect the HPLJ to the
serial port of the PI then lpr works fine, and lp screws up.  In this 
configuration lp refuses to eject the last page and ignores any requests
for banners or trailers to the print job.  In all cases lp is configured as
having a *dumb* printer.  I like lpr a bit better, 'cause  I can access 
the printer from other computers (non-SGI machines).  Still, it seems that 
the dumb serial printer config file (/usr/spool/lp/model/dumb) provided by 
SGI either has a bug or is incompatible with the HPLJ (more likely).  
Funny thing is that the same configuration file is used for the parallel 
port (just a change in the redirection) and then lp works fine with the HPLJ.
SGI was quite helpful in setting up lp and lpr so at least the computer 
found the printer, but since they don't really support the HPLJ as a printer 
they pooped out when it came to getting the HPLJ to give reasonable output.  
I would actually like to have both lp and lpr functional but hey... maybe 
I'm a dreamer.

I would like to get lpr to pass stuff through the filter program I have for
the HPLJ but I can't figure out how to configure lpr to use this filter 
by default.

Summary for people trying to use HPLJets on SGI machines:
	Get a PostScript printer and the laser printer support if you can.
	Don't expect much more than straight text
	Try the parallel port if you want to use lp
	Try the serial port if you want to use lpr
	Pressure SGI into supporting HPLJ printers (a pretty common printer).
	Send me more tips if you come across any tricks.

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 | Adios Amebas,         |       "Sweet dreams are made of this           |
 | Robert Briber         |        who am I to disagree... "               |
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