Thanks to Simon & James for the comments.
Fortunately I don't need to come up with an all inclusive printing
solution. Basically my problem is to enable users running a modified vnc
viewer on their local computer (Linux/Mac/PC), who are connected over the
internet to their own Xvnc server running on a special Linux server
machine, to have their Linux apps (which are child processes of the user's
Xvnc server process) print to the user's local printer. So security issues
or identifying the correct Xvnc server should not be a problem.
>Simon wrote:
> How would the apps running on the remote machine see the printer?
I'm thinking that they would see a generic PostScript printer that would
have an entry in the server's /etc/printcap file. They would have no idea
about what type of printer the user actually has. So, as James suggested,
the printing on the server side is to a (PostScript) file. This would go in
a spooler subdirectory associated with both the user & the specific VNC
session. The Xvnc server would act as the print spooler, taking files out
of the spooler directory and sending them across the VNC connection to the
vnc viewer application, which would either just send them to a
PostScript-capable printer or run them through Ghostscript to print them.
If the app produces files in some other format (e.g. troff, DVI, etc.) then
either the normal Linux lpr filtering will translate them to PostScript, or
the user will need to manually run a program to convert them to PostScript
& then print that.
Does anyone see any problems with this approach? If so please let me know.
-- Ron --
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