[Info-vax] printing from VMS

[Grant Taylor]

On 3/1/21 5:01 AM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> These days, people print probably mostly PDF.

I personally print few PDFs.  I mostly print web pages and email.

> Presumably most printers will print a text file.

I would not bet more than a cup of coffee on that.  I've run into 
multiple printers that would not print raw text (think command output). 
Though most of these were very low end printers, think what's on sale 
during back to school sales.

> What about PDF?  Is that done by the printer or is there some sort 
> of driver installed on the printing device?

I was not aware of printers natively supporting PDF.  But others 
indicate that some printers do.

> My wife has a Canon Pixma printer.  Not a laser printer, I guess 
> bubble jet or whatever.  However, it's not working at the moment and 
> we'll probably buy a new printer if we can't get it fixed cheaply.

Good luck.

Most printer manufacturers use printers as a loss leader to hook you on 
their ink.  Many of whom say using 3rd party ink voids the warranty.

I used to say that the mark of a good (office) printer was that it 
needed to cost between $500 and $1,000.  So, sub-$100 SOHO printers were 
disposable.

> It's probably worth it to go for a laser printer---more expensive 
> (but probably cheap enough by today's standards) but less cost per 
> page, so we'll hit break-even in a reasonable time.

The following System32Comics comes to mind:

Link - 2 Years Anniversary
  - 
https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/system32comics/new-printer-2-year-anniversary/viewer?title_no=235074&episode_no=77

> It would be nice to print to that from VMS.  What can I expect to work 
> if I set up a queue pointing to the IP address?  Text?  PostScript? 
> PDF?  Nothing?
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Ideally, such a printer would work well from VMS and various Apple 
> deviceds (iPad, MacBook, iPhone).

Last I knew, "AirPrint" (space?) was what the feature was to allow 
iDevices to print.  Few printers supported it last I looked.  Thankfully 
it's not too difficult to run a program / stack on a system to be an 
AirPrinter and convert to whatever the printer really is.  Though I 
don't know about running this on VMS as it was a Linux specific article.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die