• Sole Purpose Of Visit (unregistered)

    The stupid thing about Lester's shell scripts is that they've probably been unnecessary since 2006 (as per the link). Turn your Postscript file into a PDF and whammo! You get all the standard workflow for free ...

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to Sole Purpose Of Visit

    Indeed. The last (and only) time I set up a printer spoiler via shell scripts was a few decades ago, and then only as a temporary solution.

    Problem is, what would Lester sell then? "I'll set you up a few printers with a CUPS printing system, and for that you pay me $$$$$ each month?" Difficult. (Lester may actually be aware of this, as long as the customer isn't.)

  • Hasseman (unregistered)

    Ah printers ... Interesting stuff. Once I had a complex set up for printers in 1996. For windows. Bulk printing to a Xerox 6 meter long high speed print street with envelope part. Xerox smaller printers, fairly high speed. other printers located around europe.

    1. Print bulk. Documents sorted per number of pages per document. Print a coloured separator page when number of pages per document changes. this for the envelope part of the street
    2. The fairly high speed printer had a 30 second delay per document, then printing fast. Solution: Print to file (using driver for printer) and send file to printer after 50 documents. (keep track if something fails)
    3. If the document was for a customer in another country, print on the printer in that country. Translate address lines to correct language where the printer was located.

    Fun times

  • (nodebb)

    Thinking about the "crazies" needed in the late 1970's and 1980's ......

  • (nodebb)

    About 2000: Department U’s colour inkjet was attached to a 486 running Linux, which wasn’t up to printing PDFs. So, the 486 script sent the PDF over to Department V’s (under-used) Alpha, where the script did a print-to-file & sent the file back to the 486 .. bob’s your uncle!

  • (nodebb)

    Problem is, what would Lester sell then?

    There's a big market for image substitution. Design with a low-res image, submit for print, and it comes out with the high-res image embedded.

  • Carl Witthoft (google)

    Everything's a dil.... I mean portable format if you're brave... I mean creative enough.

  • Phelps (unregistered)

    Funny thing is he probably could have exported the PDFs to EPS (since PDF is just an EPS wrapper) and printed to the clapped together scripts with no problems.

  • (nodebb)

    Basically, Lester added corners to wheels, covering them into hexagons, and sold those to a stupid financial company? 2 lessons: people are greedy and stupid; financial companies are particularly easy to defraud, i once for a famous firm which paid $1000 per employee cubicle relocation, which involved a) dropping orange crates, b) waiting for employee to load them up, c) wheeling these crates 20 feet to new cubicle, d) waiting for employee to unload, e) picking the crates back up.

    Addendum 2021-02-02 12:18: Converting not covering, and I once worked

  • Sole Purpose Of Visit (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    I think you're misrepresenting Lester here. (Not that there's any harm in that. Plenty of other "professionals" over-promote their woeful lack of skills and flexibility and responsibility to the client and/or their employer.)

    Back when things like document management were "difficult" and "platform dependent," you got people like Lester all over the place. And if you're selling "document management" and Lester is your Miracle Max of Document Management ("it's only slightly dead"), then you're gonna run with the imbecile, because the imbecile is making you money.

    It's my personal belief, and I humbly admit that I may be wrong here, that the years just post Y2K were a fertile breeding ground for *nix neckbeards who somehow sold the idea of a random collection of shell scripts, run on the command line, over the idea that you can actually create something more sensible and more future-proofed by, you know, actually designing something and using external standards and libraries.

    I'd like to think that those days are done, although the mere employment of Lester suggests that I am hopelessly optimistic.

    I am also a neck-beard.

  • Just a dumb guy (unregistered)

    The speed of the printer has almost nothing to do with the operating system that's sending jobs to the printer.

    Unix print systems have filters that identify the type of file and, if necessary, automatically convert it to something the printer can handle. The system was just obviously misconfigured.

    Lester is an idiot.

  • Daniel Mercer (unregistered) in reply to sjw

    You didn't think to run ghostscript? In the 90's I was part of a team building a documentation management product for a fortune fifty company's medical products group. Original design called for a bunch of dialog boxes, but that proved clumsy. Then they wanted freeform text so we started building a text editor. Then they wanted more, so I dug through some Unix magazines and found ASTER*X (later Applixware, now Vistasource). Only problem, they couldn't print to HP printers (we were an HP/ HP-UX shop). So I built a middle layer using ghostscript which we used for several years until PCL printing was supported. Good times.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Sole Purpose Of Visit

    It's my personal belief, and I humbly admit that I may be wrong here, that the years just post Y2K were a fertile breeding ground for *nix neckbeards who somehow sold the idea of a random collection of shell scripts, run on the command line, over the idea that you can actually create something more sensible and more future-proofed by, you know, actually designing something and using external standards and libraries.

    Part of the problem is that the imbeciles don't understand the latter. The last time I checked (which, admittedly was probably over a decade ago), CUPS was a random collection of shell scripts. The difference was that it was a designed collection of shell scripts, which used external standards and libraries like Ghostscript behind the scenes.

  • (nodebb)

    Back in uni they had a pre-paid print quota system where you would go to a machine in the IT building, swipe your student ID and insert coins to put credit on your account. Then, when you went to print your credit would automatically be deducted, say 10c a page.

    Us budding computer systems engineers worked out that if we logged into the unix servers, converted the print jobs to postscript and spooled it to the queue manually, it would only ever count as a single page. We of course knew great power comes great responsibility, we would never exploit this... too much. A five-page computer aided test here here, a four-page lecture note there, after all... the uni was rich.

    Then a classmate with less morals and an outsider to our little cadre observed what we were doing one day and tried it himself, printing a 500 page book. We were not impressed.

    Neither was someone in IT - the loophole was closed the following day.

    Years later I went back to the uni for some official transcripts or something, and bumped into one of the senior IT administrators. We had gotten along at the time having an interest in a project called Brismesh. We got talking and I admonish him with my mea culpa about the printing loophole. His response...

    "Yeah you were on a good wicket there ... I didn't mind, You didn't go overboard and I figured if you students could work out how to hack that system, then I considered part of your education... It was all good up until that other guy ruined it for you by printing out a textbook!"

    ...Moral of the story, your IT team knows everything that goes on, and they remember all their lusers :) (oh, and unix has had no problem with PDF or PS for a long time)

  • Michael (unregistered) in reply to stoborrobots

    Scripts calling smaller, specially designed tools - the absolute beauty of *nix

  • Henning (unregistered)

    This is where Bobbi sends an email to her manager, informing him that the high-priced, overly complicated print system that they are paying through their nose for doesn't actually support one of the most common document formats in the world and that this costs the company big bucks in unnecessary labor.

  • nasch (unregistered)

    Admonish... I don't think that word means what you think it means.

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