How to Print to Printer from g++ program?

[Thomas H. George]

As a physicist I wrote large programs in Pascal before retiring in 1994 
but nothing since until last week.  I thought of a problem I wanted to 
solve, read up on C++ and got my program working with only a few 
struggles with syntax but how to write directly to the printer has 
eluded me.  I could open a disk file, write the output to disk and then 
print the file.  This would get the job done but this seems awkward.  My 
references suggested redirection so I piped the console output to the 
printer.  My poor old laser printer went wild and I had shut the system 
down - the only way I know to flush the printer buffer is to re-boot.  
When I re-booted, the printer then spit out a perfect copy of the 
console output.  There was also a statement in the references to the 
effect that a printer is just another file system.   Perhaps it is as 
simple as ofstream out_file ("/dev/lpt0");  ?  But what if the printer 
talks back?  I know when I wrote those Pascal programs I distributed 
them to people with different printers.  The programs could check 
printer capabilities and print excellent graphs if they found a 
postscript printer.   I haven't the foggiest recollection of how I 
programed this.

If this question is regarded as wildly off target for this list, for the 
record I tried a Google search for c++ forum and found essentially the 
same question posted last December at cittoolbox.com.  There were no 
responses.

Tom George

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