View source for Printing from non-PM apps

==The un*x to OS/2−EMX Porting FAQ==
See [[The un*x to OS/2-EMX Porting FAQ]]

==Printing from non-PM apps==
Printing from non−PM apps is kind of difficult on OS/2, at least it's not really well-supported. Since all ported applications from un*x lack any support for PM−based printing I try to explain some useful workarounds and solutions. Unfortunately I'm no real expert, you are welcome to supply e.g. native code to access the printer queues, etc.

Major parts of this doc are taken from the INSTALL.OS2 document from LyX. Feel free to enhance this doc ...!

===Direct Printing===
The most simple solution is printing to a Postscript file and then use gvpm for printing. If you have installed "printlp.exe" of "gnugroff.zip" from OS/2 software sites, you could try to directly print to the local OS/2 spooler: Excerpt from README.OS2 as supplied with 'gnugroff.zip':

''New printlp and printdvi programs: Printlp captures all stdin input and spools it to "lpt1" (default) or the output device set in the environment variable LP_DEVICE. Printdvi captures all stdin input into a temporary file and calls the command "v" with the name as argument (v is the viewer in emTeX) or the command in the environment variable DVI_PRINT_COMMAND. If the command contains a %s, this will be replaced by the temporary file name.''

I recommend adding to config.sys
 SET DVI_PRINT_COMMAND=VP
or "printlp" for a Postscript−capable printer or if you already configured a postscript filter for your program. A different solution to try is this one from Marcus von Cube (for xephem): Create a small REXX file:
<code>
 /* xprint.cmd */
 parse arg file
 file = translate( file, "\", "/" )
 '@print /d:lpt2 /b' file
</code>
(you may want to change "print /d:lpt2 /b" to "printdvi").

===LPR, LPD===
Warp 3 with common extensions and all versions above contain helpful tools for our purposes:
"lpr" and "lpd". If your %ETC%\INETD.LST contains the following line:
 printer tcp lpd
and <tt>inetd</tt> is running, you should be able to use lpr:
 lpr −s localhost −p lpt2 −b <filename>
(it might be necessary to set up a loopback interface, see networking FAQs or XFree86 OS/2 installation docs how to do this).

It accepts "/" as a path separator. For convenience you may create a batch file which may inherit the permanent flags. e.g. a "lp.cmd" which looks like
 lpr −s localhost −p MyPrinter %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %$7 %8 %9
where we assume you have a printer queue named "MyPrinter" on your machine. Knowledge of the physical names of your printer queues is required for this approach. You can retrieve them by looking at the "View" page of the according printer object on the WPS or in the "\SPOOL" directory on your system's partition.
A superior way is to use the more complex OS/2 API. Check out e.g. SplEnumQueue(). This API allows retrieving the default queue. The other Spl*() interfaces allow a full job control even without any PM−GUI interaction.

===Wrappers, Utils===
un*x ports require at least two features to make them work as being on an un*x system:
# a Postscript interpreter or printer, since Postscript is the standard printing format
# equivalents to "lp", "lpr" utilities
Several utils exist to help integrating such tools in your OS/2 system.
* GhostScript is the only Postscript interpreter that you could use. It can be found at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/. However it comes with a inadvisable OS/2 binary set. Better get one with X11 support from J. Sawataishi's website or from OS/2 software sites
* A more convenient example, actually a poor man's un*x "lpr" clone can be retrieved as a small ZIP archive.
* A Simple lpd−like daemon is available: pmlpd102.zip<br />Citing the README:
*:This program looks for a specified file to be created. When the file exists, a given process will be started. The program waits until the process has
ended, and then it will erase the file and wait for a new one. It was written as a daemon for GhostScript.
* Check out "lportd" or tools like "printmon" (from OS/2 software sites.)
* To deal with Postscript documents you can use the psutils (e.g. from OS/2 software sites). They offer all kinds of manipulation including printing 2 or n logical pages per sheet, creating booklets or printing only selected pages of a document. All this can be done from command line.

[[Category:EMX Porting FAQ]]