When a Unix print job is directed to a Windows printer using either the ICELP protocol or the LPR/LPD protocol the job is ASSUMED to be preformatted for the printer.
This is because in Unix print jobs are normally formatted for the printer by the application you are running. In this case, the application on the Unix machine contains a section to setup the type of printer that it will be printing to.
Some applications, notably many accounting applications, assume a very basic line printer is connected. These applications assume a fixed font, 80 chars/line and 66 lines per page. The only "formatting" codes they use are the nearly universal ones (Space, Linefeed, Carriage Return, and sometimes Form Feed). They don't have printer setup options because they assume every printer can do these functions.
Therefore if you are printing to a Windows printer from these apps we want to make sure that the print stream is passed to the Windows printer UNALTERED! If we let the Windows printer driver mess around with it there will be trouble.
Because of this, ICELP and LPD always try to send to the Windows printer in RAW mode, skipping over the driver. In addition, there are options in all of the ICE products to allow printing directly to a device (i.e. LPT1:) bypassing the Windows spooler completely.
Where we can run into trouble with this is with the so called "winprinters". To reduce costs, these printers have had the processing moved off of the printer to the Windows machine. As a consequence they often do not support the RAW printing of ASCII characters. They are looking for a preformatted bitmap. Since the Unix apps are in general not able to print to winprinters anyway it's not very likely that you will be able to print to one on a Windows machine.
As of Ice.TCP PRO Version 5.1.25, ICE.TCP PLUS version 1.0.25, Ice.OffSite version 3.0.14 and Ice.TEN version 4.7.14 there is support for WinPrinters (also know as LIDL and other acronyms. These are printers that are NOT PCL compatible). The support is limited to emulating line printer escape sequences for normal/condensed print, form feed, line feed and carriage return. This should cover most (but not all) Unix apps.
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Topic: How printing from Unix to Windows works (Read 12229 times)