Hi, I'm looking for a way to send images to a printer without using the Printers unit. I can't use it because it relies on X (on Linux) and I need to print from a CGI or command line application, that must be installed on servers without X installed.

Does FPC have a workaround for this?

Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com

Leonardo M. Ramé wrote

Hi, I'm looking for a way to send images to a printer without using the Printers unit. I can't use it because it relies on X (on Linux) and I need to print from a CGI or command line application, that must be installed on servers without X installed. Does FPC have a workaround for this?

Yes:

Draw on a postscript canvas or image canvas,
write to file and execute 'lpr myfile.ps' or 'lpr myfile.png'

Michael.

Leonardo M. Ramé wrote

Hi, I'm looking for a way to send images to a printer without using the Printers unit. I can't use it because it relies on X (on Linux) and I need to print from a CGI or command line application, that must be installed on servers without X installed.

For more details: man lp

Print a double-sided legal document to a printer called "foo": lp -d foo -o media=legal -o sides=two-sided-long-edge filename

Print an image across 4 pages:
lp -d bar -o scaling=200 filename

Print a text file with 12 characters per inch, 8 lines per inch, and a 1 inch left margin:
lp -d bar -o cpi=12 -o lpi=8 -o page-left=72 filename

Or just print the file to the default printer
lp "my long file.txt"

Nice!, and is it possible to send the bitmap data to lpr through a pipe?.

Something like "cat myfile.bmp|lpr". This doesn't work, it just prints garbage, maybe "cat" is handling the file as text.

I'm asking this because I don't want to create the file, then print it, then delete it, much better if I just create a TMemoryStream and send it to lpr.

Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com

You can't use pipes.

lpr relies on the file extension to determine the file type and invoke the proper filter.

When using pipes, it assumes postscript AFAIK.

In each case creating the file doesn't hurt. LP will create a file anyway.

Michael.

Op 2010-09-15 15:59, Leonardo M. Ramé het geskryf:

Nice!, and is it possible to send the bitmap data to lpr through a pipe?.

You can print stdout output of a program like that. eg: myprogram | lp

Something like "cat myfile.bmp|lpr". This doesn't work, it just prints garbage, maybe "cat" is handling the file as text.

Yeah, I think cat treats it like text then.

So your best bet I think is to do: lp myfile.bmp

Regards,
- Graeme -