Re: LYNX-DEV VT100 terminals and lpansi

[Hiram Lester, Jr.]

On Fri, 13 Dec 1996, Subir Grewal wrote:

> Thought I'd get your ideas on this piece of mail since it came in to the
> Lynx-learners list after I'd suggested that one could have lynx print to a
> printer attached to the terminal by using lpansi and defining the
> appropriate printer in lynx.cfg.  What we need to know is whether this
> will work for vt100 terminals (and reasonably good emulators) or whether
> it's a vt102+ thing only.

Well... I can't say for sure on an honest to goodness DEC vt100 terminal,
since I've only seen one once.  I seem to think that they didn't have a
printer port, but...  I know the vt102 does support the printing commands.
I looked through several documents including one that someone had compiled
with info on all vt terminals up through the 400 series, and they listed
other terminals such as the Graphon's that we used at my previous school,
and showed their return codes in various modes.  One of these was vt100 w/
printer, and several other terminals had similar listings, so I presume
that even if a REAL vt100 won't do it that most emulator terminals with
printer ports would support the commands even in vt100 mode.  I do know
there is practically negligible differences in the vt100 and vt102, but
I'm not sure what...

Any decent terminal emulator seems to support printing in vt100 mode
including MS-Kermit 3.14 regardless of what the message said. (even Win
3.1's terminal does, and its vt emulation is REALLY crappy). 

As mentioned in the message about MS-Kermit, there is a shell script for
unix called pcprint.sh and a DCL script for VMS called pcprint.com that
perform identical functions to lpansi.  There is also a program included
with Pine that does the same thing, and has yet another name... <sigh>
Any of these programs can be used to print from lynx or outside of it.
BTW, Pine uses the same print sequences itself when the printer is set to
"attached-to-ansi".

> It's inaccurate, mskermit 3.14 can't print to a screen running vt100
>  but it can do it with vt102 provided you're running pcprint.com
> before running mskermit or you run the pcprint.sh script file once
> connected.
> The information on this is in pcprint.doc which accompanies
> the mskermit package and which can be found in the
> \kermit\utils subdirectory once the package has been installed.

Ok, this requires another comment on my part... :)  Apparently this person
hasn't read the documentation he mentioned... PCPRINT.COM is a DCL script
and PCPRINT.SH is a unix shell script.  The documentation is in
PCPRINT.MAN, and these commands are not run before printing, but are used
TO print... 'pcprint textfile.txt' provided you have the scripts installed
in appropriate places (or path in unix is set correctly or an external
command is defined in VMS... use '@pcprint textfile.txt' under VMS
otherwise).

Also, printing DOES work in vt100 mode on MS-Kermit 3.14.  The man page
for pcprint SAYS vt102, but empirical testing with MS-Kermit shows that
vt100 is just fine.

   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
   | Hiram W. Lester, Jr.               | E-Mail: address@hidden    |
   | Computer Science                   | Home page:                    |
   | Middle Tennessee State University  |   http://pobox.com/~hwlester/ |
   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+

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