need ghostscript help!!!
 

hi all~
i have installed ghostscript 6.51 on my RH 7.2 . now i'm trying to print my .ps file........but i don't know how to make ghostscript work? what's the print command for ghostscript?

thanks for help~:newbie:

open a console and type "man ghostscript" this will bring up the man page and you can read it their.

What are you using to print? CUPS?

Well, I am no CUPS nor Ghostscript expert, but I have done a RH 7.2 install before and it was straight forward. RH configured it all for me, then when I clicked print in my file, it went straight there.

What I am trying to say is, don't try to make it brain surgery. RH is user friendly enough.

How did you install Ghostscript? I think you can actually go into your cups config and enable Ghostscript printing.

In KDE that is in K--Config---Printing

Ok these links may help you :

www.cups.org
www.linuxprinting.org

Ghostscript
 

Ghostscript does not have a print command per say. GhostScrip is used to process and convert PostScript files to other formats. Most often, it is used as a print filter, which is a shell script that your printing system parses print jobs to before sending them to your printer. RedHat should have a decent print tool configuration program that would allow you to select your printer from a list and go...

But if you wan to fiddle with Ghostscrip yourself (Certainly a fine way to spend an afternoon).. find the ghostscript documentation (should have been included with your download). and look at usage.. That should tell you what options you need to select an output device (for yoru specificy printer) and other options (like resolution, etc.)

Then you could some something like (as root):

cat test.ps | gs -device (device) -q -r 800x600 - - > /dev/lp0

I don't remember all the switches exactly, but in this example, we use -q for quiet (important, otherwise junk will be send to the printer) and we specify - - as the input and output (standard in, standard out).. Cat is used to pipe the PS file to ghostscript. (Some people will say this is a redundant use of cat, but just ignore them for the time being :) ). And the output is being re-directed to /dev/lp0 (Your first Parallel port, this might need to be adjusted if your printer is somewhere else. Drasticly different steps need to be taken if your trying this for a network printer.. Once you have all this figured out for your printer, you can start creating your very own printfilters (which I think is way cool. I never could stomach the prepackaged ones.)

Please note however, only masochistic maniacs seem to actually do this. Most other people go to www.linuxprinting.org and follow through the howtos for their system.

RH 7.2 network printing problem
 

sorry~ i forgot to tell you that my printer is on NT. ... i'm not trying to print on my linux printer............so i need to print my file throuth LAN on NT printer........it's hard for me to figure out the steps in printcap. and i need a solution to print my .ps file on my NT printer throuth samba networking . is this possible? actually our company is trying to set up a totally linux environment..............so that we can do anything on linux just like on windows............but still try to work on printing and networking communication problem !!!!:newbie:

Configuring Printer on RedHat
 

It's probably best to just run the printtool that comes with RedHat. That's RedHats printer configuration tool, that will setup all the details for you. (you never did tell us what kind of printer you are tyring to use or why you had to download Ghostscript, should have all been included with your distro).

The process to do it the manual hard way is much the same as I already detailed. Only, instead of redirecting output to /dev/lp0, you pipe it to smbprint (part of Samba, please see Samba documentation.) Then you have to configure printcap. If I remember right (and I might not). you just leave lp= blank so the lpd doesn't send the print job anywhere, and you leave the work of piping the output to smbprint to you input filter (if =) Please do a search for recent posts by me for details of the pritncap file.

Again, unless for some reason it doesn't work, I suggest starting out with RedHat Printtool. Will make your life much simpler.

Redhat documentation suggests the widget printtool should be able to sort you out.

I have just connected my SuSe laptop to an HP printer on a LAN served by an NT server. Suse uses YAST2, but from the screenshots it looks almost identical to printtool.

All that I needed to do was:

1) Select the type of printer (ie samba/NT/LAN)
2) Add the server details to /etc/hosts (too lazy to use IP address)
3) insert the printer share name and server name into the fields provided
4) Select a fortunately included print driver

That was it