Customizing the LP Print Service (Tasks)

This chapter provides background information and procedures for customizing the LP print service.

This is a list of the step-by-step instructions in this chapter.

• "How to Adjust the Printer Port Characteristics"

• "How to Add a terminfo Entry for an Unsupported Printer"

• "How to Set Up a Custom Printer Interface Program"

• "How to Create a New Print Filter"

• "How to Create a New Form Definition"

For overview information about printers, see Chapter 2, Managing Printing Services (Overview).

Adjusting Printer Port Characteristics

The printer port characteristics set by the LP print service must be compatible with the printer communication settings. If the default printer port settings provided by the LP print service do not work with a printer, refer to the printer manual from the manufacturer to find out what settings the printer requires from the LP print service. Use the stty command to set and display printer communication settings.

The following table shows the default stty settings used by the LP print service.

Table 7-1 stty Default Settings Used by the LP Print Service

How to Adjust the Printer Port Characteristics

1. Log in as superuser, lp, or assume an equivalent role on the print server.

2. Adjust the printer port characteristics.

   # lpadmin -p printer-name -o "stty=options"

   -p printer-name	Name of the printer for which you are adjusting the port characteristics.
   -o "stty=options"	Sets the port characteristic (stty option) specified by options.You can change more than one stty option setting with this command. Enclose each option in single quotation marks and use a space to separate the options. For a complete list of options, see stty(1). Table 7-1 shows the default stty settings used by the LP print service.

3. Verify that the printer port characteristics have been changed.

   # stty -a

Examples--Adjusting the Printer Port Characteristics

The following example shows how to set the port characteristics for the printer luna. The parenb option enables parity checking/generation, parodd sets odd parity generation, and cs7 sets the character size to 7 bits.

# lpadmin -p luna -o "stty='parenb parodd cs7'"

The following example shows how to set the terminal baud rate to 19200 for the printer venus.

# lpadmin -p venus -o "stty=19200"

Adding a terminfo Entry for an Unsupported Printer

The LP print service uses an interface program and the terminfo database to initialize each printer and establish a selected page size, character pitch, line pitch, and character set.

Each printer is identified in the terminfo database with a short name. The name required by the terminfo database is identical to the name used to set the TERM shell variable. This name is also the printer type you specify when setting up a printer. For example, the entries for different types of PostScript printers are in the /usr/share/lib/terminfo/P directory. The default entries provided with the SunOS release are PS (for PostScript) and PSR (for PostScript Reverse).

If you cannot find a terminfo entry for your printer, you still might be able to use the printer with the LP print service without the automatic selection of page size, pitch, and character sets. However, you might have trouble keeping the printer set in the correct modes for each print request.

If there is no terminfo entry for your type of printer and you want to keep the printer set in the correct modes, you can either customize the interface program used with the printer or add an entry to the terminfo database. A terminal or printer entry in the terminfo database contains and defines hundreds of items. The LP print service, however, uses fewer than 50 of these items. The following table lists the required terminfo items for a printer.

Table 7-2 Required terminfo Items for a Printer