Slave printing

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <114 at crystal1.UUCP> jw at crystal1.UUCP (John S. Wainscott) writes:
>> Does anyone know where I can find a freeware, shareware, or buyware  
>> slave printing program for my unix box?

>"Slave printing" means hooking up a serial printer to the extra port on
>a terminal and being able to print a file to it.

If you just want to be able to say "program file(s)" or "something |program"
and have the output go to the aux port on the terminal, all you need is
a shell script like this:
#
echo "\033[5i\c"
cat $*
echo "\033[4i\c"

Your echo command may vary depending on the codes your terminal needs
for transparent print and whether your unix uses \c or echo -n to avoid
extra newlines.  Generally the printer must be able to keep up with
the same speed the terminal runs, although PC's emulating terminals
tend to provide flow control.

I did a little program a long time ago to provide page-at-a-time output
to allow hand feeding a daisy-wheel printer with a prompt to continue
or quit before each page.  It did some tricky stuff to make it work
from Crystalwriter which ran it in the background with only stderr
left connected to the terminal, but you could also run it in the
foreground and use options to pause or not.  I'll try to dig it up
if anyone wants it.  (Note that it doesn't attempt to do the
kind of transparent printing that you would need to run from the
print spooler).

Les Mikesell
  les at chinet.chi.il.us