Lua printer question

Forum: Printers
Topic: Lua printer question
started by: Uta

Posted by Uta on Mar. 26 2008,20:38

I have installed DSL 4.2.5 on my HD, I have wifi working, sound working and printing working. My question concerns "Lua". I placed it's icon on my desktop (it's linked to /usr/local/bin/printing.lua) when I drop a text file on it nothing happens. As I said before printing is working from app menus (Ted,Firefox, etc...). My printer is a network printer that was configured via Apsfilter (gimp 4.x) and works great.
Any ideas? Thanks!

Posted by roberts on Mar. 26 2008,21:07

Likely that I used the Apsfilter default printer name of "lp" and yours is not.

/usr/local/bin/printing.lua is a script that I use everyday. If you can print from the command line then you can drag-n-drop text or postscript files to print. I always print to file from each application. Then when I am ready to actually print, I drag the .txt or .ps onto the printing desktop icon.

I suggest to look at the script and look at the second to last line.

Code Sample

#!/bin/lua
-- (c) 2007 Robert Shingledecker
-- Lua script to support printing via dfm printing icon.

function checkPrintcap()
printcap,err = io.popen("ls -s /opt/printcap|awk '{print $1}'")
printcapSize = printcap:read("*l")
printcap:close()
return printcapSize
end

if checkPrintcap() == "0" then
response = fltk.fl_choice("No printer found!\nSetup Printer Now?","No","Yes",NULL)
if response == 1 then
os.execute('aterm -T "apsfilter" -e sudo /usr/share/apsfilter/SETUP')
if checkPrintcap() == "0" then
os.exit(1)
else
os.execute('touch /tmp/printer.flag')
end
else
os.exit(1)
end
end

lprTest = io.popen("ps | grep lpd | grep -v 'grep lpd'")
lprCheck = lprTest:read("*l")
lprTest:close()
if lprCheck == nil then
print("Starting lpd...")
os.execute("sudo /usr/sbin/lpd")
end
if #arg == 1 then
os.execute("lpr -h -Plp "..arg[1])
end

Change the os.execute to your specific needs.

Posted by Uta on Mar. 26 2008,22:08

Thanks for your quick reply.
I edited in my printer's name and it works great.
Thank You!

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Mar. 27 2008,00:00

I wonder if checking for the PRINTER env var would be useful? (and use something like os.getenv I suppose)

Posted by roberts on Mar. 27 2008,00:36

Is it only the printer name that differs for a:

1. Unix network printer?
2. A USB printer?
3. A samba printer?

I write script using mainly defaults (parallell and lp) especially when I do not own or cannot setup all supported situations.

Perhaps those who use apsfilter in each supported protocol/printer style can post or verify that only a printer name is variable. It is of course then easy to implement an environment variable. However by default setup of apsfilter no such environment variable is created.