The Printing HOWTO should contain everything you need to know to help
you set up printing services on your Linux box(en). As life would
have it, it's a bit more complicated than in the point-and-click world
of Microsoft and Apple, but it's also a bit more flexible and
certainly easier to administer for large LANs.
This document is structured so that most people will only need to read
the first half or so. Most of the more obscure and
situation-dependent information in here is in the last half, and can
be easily located in the Table of Contents, whereas most of the
information through section 8 or 9 is probably needed by most people.
Since version 3.x is a complete rewrite, much information from
previous editions has been lost. This is by design, as the previous
HOWTOs were so large as to be 60 typeset pages, and had the narrative
flow of a dead turtle. If you do not find the answer here, you are
encouraged to a) scan the previous version at the
Printing HOWTO Home Page
and b) drop me a note saying what ought to be here but isn't.
The
Printing HOWTO Home Page is a good place to find
the latest version; it is also, of course, distributed from Metalab
(metalab.unc.edu) and your friendly local LDP mirror.
This is the fourth generation of the Printing HOWTO. The history of
the PHT may be chronicled thusly:
I wrote the printing-howto in 1992 in response to too many
printing questions in comp.os.linux, and posted it. This
predated the HOWTO project by a few months and was the first
FAQlet called a `howto'. This edition was in plain ascii.
After joining the HOWTO project, the Printing-HOWTO was merged
with an Lpd FAQ by Brian McCauley
<B.A.McCauley@bham.ac.uk>; we continued to co-author the
PHT for two years or so. At some point we incorporated the work
of Karl Auer <Karl.Auer@anu.edu.au>. This generation of
the PHT was in TeXinfo, and available in PS, HTML, Ascii, and
Info.
After letting the PHT rot and decay for over a year, and an
unsuccessful attempt at getting someone else to maintain it,
this rewrite happened. This generation of the PHT is written in
SGML using the LinuxDoc DTD and the SGML-Tools-1 package.
Beginning with version 3.27, it incorporates a summary of a
companion printer support database; before 3.27 there was never
a printer compatability list in this HOWTO (!).
In mid-January, 2000, I found out about the PDQ print "spooler".
PDQ provides a printing mechanism so much better than lpd ever
did that I spent several hours playing with it, rewrote parts of
this HOWTO, and bumped the version number of the document to 4.
This document is Copyright (c) 1992-1999 by Grant Taylor. Feel free
to copy and redistribute this document according to the terms of the
GNU General Public License, revision 2 or later.
