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apsfilter
Originally written April 17, 2000
Rewritten and revised October 28, 2000
I installed apsfilter mainly to be able to use an old Canon BJ100 Bubble Jet Printer. I did a search on Freebsd.Org for Ink Jet and one of the
first few items was apsfilter. I studied it and decided this was the ticket. I however was not prepared for what was in store for me.
Since apsfilter is in the ports collection I figured it would be a pretty straight forward install,WRONG. I am using a dialup connection and spent the
next 6+ hours waiting for it to download the 30 (I exaggerate a bit) required ports to install. It however did do a straight forward install and then I just needed to make it work. The setup file for
apsfilter is in /usr/local/apsfilter directory. The file you need to run is SETUP and will step you through the process.
Follow the steps below:
Note: that commands will be italicized.
Note: Paths are bold
1) kill the process for lpd
2) su
3) cd /usr/local/apsfilter
4) ./SETUP (yes its upper case)
5) Follow the instructions, there will be specific areas for you to know details about your hardware.
Basic Info
lpt0 this is your first printer port (sorry to be really basic but not all of us are experts).
You need to know the printers resolution IE: 180x180, 300x300 etc. (I cheated and used default since it was a really old printer and the resolution is poor
anyway)
After all the information has been input to your computer, select "T" which will print a test page. (your printer must
be connected to the computer and also turned on) If the test page prints out to your satisfaction then you can hit the "C" key and that will write a new printcap file. (printcap is in the /etc
directory and really you should make a copy of it. cp printcap printcap.save) if the test page is not satisfactory go back through the options and print another test page and save the setup you were
happiest with. Remember to use the "C" key to save your setup.
When all is saved and you have finished the setup program for apsfilter you need to fire lpd up again. When you type lpd you may get an error on your
printcap. You may see something about lp and lp are using the same spool directory.
What has happened is apsfilter has appended some instructions to your printcap and the old instructions need to be commented
out. cd to the /etc dir and edit printcap to either remove the old lp entries or comment them out. The following is an example from my printcap:
lp| local line printer:\
:sh:\
:lp=/dev/lpt0:sd=/var/spool/output/lpd:lf=var/log/lpd-errs
This is the default printcap info and what you need to comment out. APSFilter appends info later in the printcap and also references the lp using the
printer you selected as your line printer. The apsfilter entry must be there to work properly.
Now it is time to restart your printer demon. Type lpd at the prompt. You may want to put lpd in your rc.local file and have it fire on boot
which will take the burden off of you to remember to fire it each time you reboot. FreeBSD 4+ has given us the option to start lpd at boot so this makes life a little easier.
I hope this will help you to use apsfilter as it is really a sweet printer filter setup and will allow you to, not only print great text files using a
bubble jet printer, but also will allow you to print graphics out as well.
Gizmo
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