Copyright © 2004 Gene Michael Stover. All rights reserved. Permission to copy, store, & view this document unmodified & in its entirety is granted.
Have you ever had a PostScript file on disk, a PostScript printer on the other side of the room, Microsloth Winders in between, & therefore no easy way to print that PostScript file? Sure, it's possible to print a PostScript file on Winders, but it's not as easy as it should be. How easy should it be? Well, a PostScript printer speaks PostScript natively, so you should be able to send that PostScript file to that PostScript printer almost verbatim & see your output. But without special software, Winders doesn't let you do that.
Installing that special software1 isn't too difficult, but what if you are at the public library, or Kinko's, where you don't have permission to install anything? What if you are at your mother's house, where no one has ever printed a PostScript file, & you are in a hurry? I mean that, sure, you can print a PostScript file from Microsloth Winders, but it's not as easy as it should be, & it should be almost as easy as copying a file because all you need to do is copy the PostScript file to your PostScript printer.
So I wrote a program to make it that easy. I kept it so simple, so small, that it's virtually guarranteed to work on whatever Winders system you have, & it's so quick to try that installation time & priviledges are not a problem. I hope.
The source code & executalbe file described in this article & in the accompanying files are licensed according to the terms of the Gnu General Public License (GPL).
The documentation (the document you are reading now) is copyrighted by Gene Michael Stover. The copyright notice is at the beginning of the document. The documentation is not licensed according to the GPL.
The executable file is http://lisp-p.org/psw/print-postscript.exe. You may download that file to your computer, & it'll be ready to use. I explain how to use it in another section.
The source code is in two files:
To make use of the source code, you will need a C compiler, a make2, & a knowledge of C programming.
If you want to compile it yourself, you will need to modify the Makefile. You'll want to ensure that the COMPILE_c & LINK_c macros use your compiler & linker. You'll want to ensure that the paths to the include (*.h) files & other paths are appropriate for your system.
Then run make (or nmake if you are using Microsloth's version of make).
You'll have one result file, print-postscript.exe.
If you downloaded print-postscript.exe or built it yourself, copy it to a directory in your path or another directory from which you want to run it.
print-postscript -help
print-postscript -?
print-postscript -h
print-postscript /?
print-postscript /h
print-postscript /help
print-postscript [-f pathname] printername
print-postscript -l
print-postscript is a command line program. In other words, to use it, you must first make a command line window.3 You must run print-postscript by typing the program's name, followed by the appropriate command line options & arguments, into the command line window, then pressing Return4.
The first six forms cause print-postscript to print a short usage message.
For the seventh for, print-postscript sends a PostScript file to a PostScript printer. The pathname argument, if present, is the name of the PostScript file; if it is absent, print-postscript reads the PostScript file from standard input. The printername argument is the name of the printer. It is critical to get the proper name of the printer or print-postscript won't work.
The eight form, with its -l option, exists to help determine the name of the printer.
Determining the printer's true, full name isn't always easy.
You can use the -l command line option to make print-postscript print a list of printers.
For locally connected printers, such as a printer connected to the LPT or USB ports, the -l should always work.
For networked printers, you might need to print a short document to the printer before trying ``print-postscript -l''. This is because the flags that print-postscript uses to get a list of printers seems to list local printers & recently used remote printers. I haven't figured out what flags print all remotely connected printers, not just recently used ones.
I apologize for how print-postscript.exe is so picky about the printer's name, but if you keep at it & get the right printer name, it should work fine. (Well, it has for me so far.)
Let's say that print-postscript.exe is installed
in the C:\bin directory, the file I want to
print is C:\My documents\report.ps, & the
printer is zippo shared from zardos.
To print the aforementioned report.ps, I would
create a command line window. In it, I could type
``C:\bin\print-postscript
C:\My documents\report.ps
\\zardos\zippo''.
I could type a shorter command if I take advantage of the current directory, like this:
C:\> cd "My documents"
C:\My documents> C:\bin\print-postscript -f report.ps \zardos\zippo
If print-postscript.exe is in the same directory as report.ps, my job is even easier. After I make the command line window, I could do this:
C:\> cd "My documents"
C:\My documents> .\print-postscript -f report.ps \\zardos\zippo
The source code is in http://lisp-p.org/psw/print-postscript.c.
If you look at it, one of the first things you'll notice is that I make use of static functions. Most people hate that. Sorry, but I've been programming C since 1985, & I prefer to use static functions where static functions do.
Then you will notice that the names of my static functions begin with S_. I make most function names begin with the name of the module, followed by an underbar. For static functions, I use S as a pseudo-module name. Again, most people hate it, but I've been doing this since 1985, & this is the style I prefer.
Yet another convention I use is that most functions return zero on success, non-zero on exit. This is the convention of the unix API.
The program's entry point is, of course, main. It uses S_CommandLine to parse the command line, then S_Run to do everything else.
S_CommandLine is as uninteresting as main.
S_Run opens the PostScript file for input. We use the Standard C I/O functions on the PostScript file because they are convenient, but we must use Winders-specific functions for the printer. We send the PostScript data to the printer as ``raw'' data, so we must open the printer with OpenPrinter, tell Winders that we're printing a document with StartDocPrinter, & then ensure that the printer is in PostScript mode. All that printer preparation happens in S_StartPrinter.
After that, it's just a matter of copying the PostScript data from the input file to the printer. That happens in S_Loop.
When we're done with the copying operation, we tell Winders that we're done printing with EndDocPrinter. Then we close the printer handle.
I guess print-postscript could check a printer's capabilities. If the printer understood PostScript, then print-postscript could tell Windows that it's a PostScript job we'll be printing. That might allow us to print PostScript files to printers which do not understand PostScript in their firmware but for which there is a PostScript driver installed.
If the printer didn't understand PostScript, we'd want to send the PostScript data to the printer as ``raw'', which is what we do now. That's so that we can print a PostScript file to a PostScript printer with a minimum of fuss, which is the main duty of print-postscript.
The printer name could be an optional argument. If the printer name is present, print-postscript could work as it does now. If the printer name is absent, print-postscript could present a menu of printers & allow the user to select one. The menu could be a text-only list of numbered items.