On Saturday 08 December 2001 12.14, Purple Shirt wrote:
Anyhow I am not too fond of the "ascii,generic,raw" method. When I want to print to a printer I want to say 'print printername filename' and I as a user don't want to have to worry which device I have to queue it to. Imagine somebody develops 15 more device types and in the future we have to set up 15 queues for a single printer. What a mess...
Yep. That's the idea behind auto (not generic). It tries to determine through various more or less ingenious methods what type of file you're trying to print, and handle it accordingly. This autodetection is probably what broke between 7.2 and 7.3 in your case. apsfilter is just a wrapper. IIRC it uses the ghostscript drivers for HP which I believe are written by HP themselves nowadays. The raw device is ideal for networked printing, where the client's driver has already converted the spool file to a format recognizable by the printer. I haven't heard about ifhp, since gs works for my deskjet, but that's linux in a nutshell: use whatever works best for you. //Anders