CONTENTS:
a) What is printop?
b) Installation of printop
c) If it doesn't work
d) Use of printop
So here we go:
a) What is printop?
printop is a little program that gives you a graphical
interface to control the printers and queues for unix-like
systems using the LPRng print system. It uses
the commands lpq, lpc, lprm to get information and control
the printers and you just have to click with your mouse.
In a large network it shows you all the printers and gives
you the full funtionality of the lprng-commands, so you have
a good overview of what is happening.
It needs tcl (7.4) and tk (4.x) to run. And LPRng as print-system.
b) Installation of printop
Just move the file "printop" and "printop.cfg" to any
location. Then edit the file printop to fit your needs:
1) In the first line, the path to "wish" (the tcl/tk-shell)
has to be adapted for your system.
2) Set the paths for the commands that are called by printop
(lpq, lpc, lprm, rsh) according to your system.
3) Change the value for "listprinter" to your preferred
default printer.
4) Change the value of "interval" to your preferred rescan
interval (every so many milliseconds a rescan will be done).
5) Change the value of "show_all_queues" to 0, if you want
printop to display just the busy queues by default.
6) Set do_confirm to 1 if you want confirmation dialogs
for all actions.
7) Set tk_strictMotif to 0 if you do not want printop
to imitate the look-and-feel of Motif.
8) Change the global font and border width settings
if you don't like the default settings.
And now edit the file printop.cfg to configure a menu to select
printers from, according to your needs. You can also create a
file ".printop.cfg" in the home directory, to configure printops
menu for each user.
1) You can create printer entries with the command:
printer button {printer-name} {menu-name}
printer-name can be a tcl-regexp, so that "^d.*" would
mean: Create a button for all the printers that begin
with the letter d. {menu-name} can be empty {}, so that
the buttons are created directly in the choose-main-menu,
or it can be the name of a submenu (or the path to a
subsubmenu etc).
2) You can create new submenus in the main-menu with the command:
printer menu "Menu-Name" {widget-name}
Menu-Name is the name that is displayed in the menus, widget-
name is the name of the created widget. If you create a
submenu {menu_a}, then you can create a subsubmenu with
the command
printer menu "MySubSubMenu" {submen} {men_a}
and adding the menu-names to a path you can have subsubsubmenus
printer menu "SubSubSubmenu" {subsubmen} {men_a.submen}
With the button command you can then insert buttons to your
menu.
Examples:
If you don't have too many printers, you can just list them
directly in the choose-menu (without submenus). Your printop.cfg
would then look like this:
printer button {.*} {}
(create buttons for all printers [.*] in no submenu).
In our case all the printers are named after the building
and the room-numbers where they stand. So I create a menu
for each building and then insert all the printers of the
building (the printers that have names beginning with the
building-name, in our case a simple letter).
printer menu "Building A" {menu_a}
printer button {^a.*} {menu_a}
printer menu "Building B" {menu_b}
printer button {^b.*} {menu_b}
... and so on ...
Hopefully this is understandable to anyone else...
c) If it doesn't work
Printop may have some difficulties in parsing the output of lpc
and lpq. Those programs have so many different kinds of printer-
configs and as a result so many different kinds of output that
I'm not sure printop can handle all of them. So if you see an
error, it could be my fault. What to to in this case? Just send
me the error message (or an execat description of the error),
your /etc/printcap and your printop.cfg (and maybe the changes
to the printop program). If I have some time, I will fix it
(probably in the next few days). My E-Mail is in the About-Window
of printop (or just below in this text).
d) Use of printop
If you start printop, it will open a window with a big listbox
to the left and some buttons and menus at the right side. In the
listbox all the printer-queues, in which some jobs are pending,
are displayed (or just all queues, depending on the setting of
the radio buttons at the bottom. You can select one (just by
clicking on it) and then use the entries in the "Commands" menu
to operate on this queue. Here you can enable and disable printing
or queueing, all the operations you can do to a queue.
You can inspect a single queue by just doubleclicking it in
the listbox or, if it's not displayed, by pressing the button
"Choose Queue" and choosing one from the menu.
A new window opens and displays on the left side the entries
(print jobs) of the queue (upper listbox), the error and status
messages (as displayed by "lpq") of the queue, and the status
as displayed by "lpc").
To the right in the menu "Commands" are some entries to control
the queue (enable, disable, ...) and you find some buttons to control
the printjobs. E.g. you can delete a printjob by clicking on it
and then pressing the button "Delete". Or you can just click the
delete-button and then enter the id of the printjob (or the term
"all" if you want to delete all printjob of the queue, or the
username).
I hope this gives you an idea of how to work with printop.
Shouldn't be too bad ;-)
So long.... Olaf
If you find this tool handy, why don't you write me an email (or even
better a postcard)? Just see my adress in the about-window of printop.
Olaf Gellert
[email protected] _ - __o
Universitaet Hamburg, FB Informatik _- _`\<,_
http:www.asta.uni-hamburg.de/users/cbx/ - (_)/ (_)
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