[Gnumed-devel] Mac OS workarounds for lack of kprinter, gtklp GUI printing

[Jim Busser]

On 2010-01-11, at 1:01 PM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 09:33:48PM +0100, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> 
>>> While the PDF generation works fine, I am now debugging to
>>> get such GNUmed-generated PDFs (under Ubuntu which, like
>>> Debian, uses Gnome and does not have kprinter installed)
>>> actually to the printer.
>> 
>> Install gtklp and adjust gm-print_doc accordingly.
> 
> I have enhanced the default gm-print_doc to detect which of
> kprinter or gtklp is available and use whichever exists.

Given that apparently (on the Mac) the GUI cannot be called directly 
(apparently, a very very small Cocoa application would need to be written) 
HOWEVER I have tested on the Mac 10.6 (Snow leopard) that both

        lp
        lpr

will pass a PDF directly to my current default Mac (HP) IP printer.

Accordingly can you further enhance the default so that if neither kprinter nor 
gtklp are detectable, run lp ?

I am not sure whether the choice of lp or lpr matters except for the caveat to 
not allow such printing across one's firewall:

        http://www.cs.ait.ac.th/~on/O/oreilly/tcpip/firewall/ch08_17.htm
        http://8help.osu.edu/wks/unix_course/intro-51.html
        http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sgi/faq/admin/section-76.html
        http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/options.html

Optionally, the Mac copy of gm-print_doc could be end-user altered:

- if and when a small Cocoa app became available
- or in the meantime the Mac user might substitute one of

        open -a Preview <filename> or
        osascript -e 'tell application "Preview" to open ((POSIX file 
"fullySpecifiedFilenameInQuotes") as text)' 

... where multiple 'e commands" can be put together on a single line

        http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19736