On my old Brother HL-1270N I found I had to append a “\004” to the end of any
file sent to the printer to get it to print. This was true for plain text as
well as Postscript files. The printer has different internal “queues” for
plain text and Postscript so I wrote a simple filter that convetred plain text
files into Postscript using enscript and sent everything to the POSTSCRIPT_P1
queue on the printer.
I now use a newer Brother HL-3230CDW that has the same setups but i’ve
discovered I don’t need to append anything to either type of files to get them
to print and the printer is smart enough to handle both plain text and
Postscript regardless of which internal queue the file is sent to, so I don’t
need any special handling anymore.
The printer on my local network is named “patches” at a fixed address of
192.168.1.2 and my /etc/printcap entry is:
lp|patches:\
:sh:lp=:mx#0:rm=patches:rp=TEXT_P1:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:\
:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:
Hope this helps,
-bob
