One of the more difficult administrative issues is whether to print
banners (job separators) or to save the large amount of wasted
paper, time and effort.
The LPRng and
ifhp
combination provide a rather esoteric set of methods to generate banners,
at least one of which should be suitable for your application.
You should be aware that some printers have the obnoxious habit of generating their own banner pages when jobs are transferred via the RFC1179 protocol. You should consult the manufacturers documentation and take the necessary steps to turn printer banner page generation off.
The following steps need to be done to configure LPRng to print
banners using
ifhp
.
sh
(suppress header)
option must be off
(sh@
).ifhp
filter to generate the banner.
If you want LPRng to generate the banner,
you can specify a
banner
generation program,
and inform
ifhp
not
to generate a banner (the default).
Printcap:
lp:
:sh@
:banner=/usr/local/filters/bannergen
:if=ifhp -Tbanner
ifhp
to generate a banner,
you do not have LPRng generate a banner and
enable banner printing by
ifhp
.
You also can specify the
sb
or short banner option,
which will cause a very short dummy banner to be generated.
This will be ignored by the
ifhp
filter.
Printcap:
lp:
# short banner, save effort
:sh@:sb
:if=ifhp -Tbanner
banner=
language:
Printcap:
lp:
# short banner, save effort
:sh@:sb
:if=ifhp -Tbanner=language
Occasionally it is useful to be able to generate a banner
in
standalone
mode.
For example,
you might want to generate a banner
when using an LPRng
bounce queue
to perform filtering operations before forwarding jobs to another
printer.
To do this requires a stand-alone banner printer.
ifhp
can be configured to do this by using:
ifhp -Tbanner_only
In addition,
you can specify the type of banner you want using:
ifhp -Tbanner_only=language
Lastly,
in order to be vintage software compatible,
if the ifhp program is invoked as the
banner
program,
this is effectivly the same as
ifhp -Tbanner_only
For example,
to use this with a bounce queue to an
hp4
printer,
the following printcap entry might be used:
# for clients, force spooling to server
lp:lp=lp@server
# server
lp:server
:bq=raw@printer
:ifhp=model=hp4
:generate_banner
:banner=/usr/local/filters/ifhp -Tbanner_only
:if=/usrlocal/filters/ifhp
:of=/usrlocal/filters/ifhp