Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <20111027143609.60335.qmail at joyce.lan>, you wrote:

>I'm not a huge fan of CUPS, but at this point it's the best of a bad
>lot.  I find the queueing useful, since I often print documents long
>enough that I don't want to wait.

I don't quite understand the issue you are raising john.

Even with my direct-to-/dev/{u}lpt0 approach, if I needed to print a really
big file, I would just start the print in one window and then minimize that
one and continue on working in my other windows.  I mean in what way would
one need to "wait"?

>>More importantly, CUPS, for me at least, seems to be quite slow.
>>There's a loooooooong pause after I queue something for printing
>>until something actually comes out of the printer.
>
>Yeah.  I have a similar printer with a similar problem.  I believe
>that what's going on is that the current version of CUPS tells all the
>clients to print to PDF, then for printers that don't handle PDF,
>converts that to postcript using ghostscript which is very, very slow.

Huh??

John are you saying that my documents, some of which *start out* as .PS files,
are converted by CUPS to .PDF and thence (since I don't have any printers
that speak PDF) the document is then converted *back* to Postscript for
actual printing??

If so, I can sure see why the multiple pointless conversion would indeed
take up a lot of time.

>I think this is a bug.

If it is, then I think it may be a long-standing one.

I did something very like what I just described doing on FreeBSD 8.2 also
back on my old FreeBSD 7.0 system which I first installed maybe three years
of more ago.

I can't really remember anymore if I did it primarily for speed reasons or
because (as now) I just didn't want to have to go thru all fo the falderall
of properly configuring CUPS, but I suspect it was both.


Regards,
rfg