[gs-devel] xefitra internalise ijs?

[Ralph Giles]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 08:52:19PM +0100, lazer1 wrote:

> but does the gs ijs client depend on an external ijs server binary
> in order to print things?

Yes. At least, that was the idea behind developing ijs in the first 
place.

> 
> if gs can do that anyway can you give an example command line for an 
> example printer of how you would convert say annots.pdf to 
> a printer binary file for that printer.
> 
> for instance for say epson you can create a binary thus:
> 
> 
> gs -sDEVICE=epson -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=somefile%d annots.pdf
> 
> and then in an OS dependent way the binary files just need to be 
> sent down a parallel port to the printer.
> 
> can this be done via gs ijs using some platform-independent driver file
> for supported printers?

It could be done, I suppose. For various reasons, it's not. For example, 
the software that knows what ijs server binary to talk to and what 
options to give it is generally also the software that knows how to send 
the output files to the device. That information has been centralized 
in other tools which just call gs as part of a pipeline. So we'd have to 
internalize the hardware detection and configuration database as well 
for this to work.
I did print using commandline gs over ijs for a number of years. It's 
not too hard to learn the extra options. See the documentation for
your ijs server (gutenprint or hpijs, usually) and 
http://ghostscript.com/doc/current/Devices.htm#IJS 

HTH,
 -r