Re: LYNX-DEV Printing from dumb terminals

[Mike Brown]

> The system administrator says there is no way to enable printing to a 
> printer attached to one of these dumb terminals. That Lynx's 
> understanding of print to attached printer would be a printer attached 
> to the web server.
> 
> Is this correct? 

Yes, that's correct.  The server running Lynx is streaming Lynx's
character output to the terminal.  Some of the characters are special
sequences that tell the terminal or terminal emulator to do some trickery
with its builtin functions for screen manipulation, such as clearing to
the end of the line, drawing a box, setting a new scroll region, moving
the cursor, etc.  Theoretically the terminal may be able to process some
particular incoming character sequence that would tell it to turn on a
local printer and/or do a screen dump, but building in robust support for
that in Lynx would be difficult. 

>Is there any way to configure Lynx on the server end to 
> assist in printing at a dumb terminal?

Lynx's (p)rint function can send a formatted, plain text version of the
page being currently viewed to an external program on the host machine as
input.  If your sysadmin networked the printers, instead of attaching them
to the local terminals, s/he could write a simple wrapper script which
would determine which tty the input is coming from, and pipe the data via
lpr (or some other print manager) to the appropriate printer.

Mike
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