Printing from non-PM apps

Printing from non-PM apps is kind of difficult on OS/2, at least it's not really well supported. Since all ported applications from un*x lack any support for PM-based printing I try to explain some useful workarounds and solutions. Unfortunately I'm no real expert, you are welcome to supply e.g. native code to access the printer queues, etc.
Major parts of this doc are taken from the INSTALL.OS2 document from LyX. Feel free to enhance this doc ...!

Direct Printing

The most simple solution is printing to a Postscript file and then use gvpm for printing. If you have installed "printlp.exe" of "gnugroff.zip" from OS/2 software sites, you could try to directly print to the local OS/2 spooler: Excerpt from README.OS2 as supplied with 'gnugroff.zip':
New printlp and printdvi programs: Printlp captures all stdin input and spools it to "lpt1" (default) or the output device set in the environment variable LP_DEVICE. Printdvi captures all stdin input into a temporary file and calls the command "v" with the name as argument (v is the viewer in emTeX) or the command in the environment variable DVI_PRINT_COMMAND. If the command contains a %s, this will be replaced by the temporary file name.
I recommend to add to config.sys 
	SET DVI_PRINT_COMMAND=VP
or "printlp" for a Postscript-capable printer or if you already configured a postscript filter for your program. A different solution to try is this one from Marcus von Cube (for xephem): Create a small REXX file: 
/* xprint.cmd */
   parse arg file
   file = translate( file, "\", "/" )
   '@print /d:lpt2 /b' file
(you may want to change "print /d:lpt2 /b" to "printdvi").

LPR, LPD

Warp 3 with common extensions and all versions above contain helpful tools for our purposes: "lpr" and "lpd". If your %ETC%\INETD.LST contains the following line: 
	printer tcp lpd
and inetd is running, you should be able to use lpr: 
	lpr -s localhost -p lpt2 -b <filename>
(it might be necessary to set up a loopback interface, see networking FAQs or XFree86OS/2 installation docs how to this).
It accepts "/" as a path separator. For convenience you may create a batch file which may inherit the permanent flags. e.g. a "lp.cmd" which looks like 
  lpr -s localhost -p MyPrinter %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %$7 %8 %9
where we assume you have a printer queue named "MyPrinter" on your machine. Knowledge of the physical names of your printer queues is required for this approach. You can retrieve them by looking looking at the "View" page of the according printer object on the WPS or in the "\SPOOL" directory on your system's partition.
A superior way is to use the more complex OS/2 API. Check out e.g. SplEnumQueue(). This API allows to retrieve the default queue. The other Spl*() interfaces allow a full job control even without any PM-GUI interaction.

Wrappers, Utils

un*x ports require at least two features to make them work as being on an un*x system:
  1. a Postscript interpreter or printer, since Postscript is the standard printing format
  2. equivalents to "lp", "lpr" utilities

Several utils exist to help integrating such tools in your OS/2 system.

Last modified on 20020105