anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:

> Joe Pfeiffer writes:
>>Printing is very different, and it's perfectly reasonable in a
>>networked enviroment that the printers be on different machines from
>>either my compute server or my workstation.
>
> Yes. But the printer I want to use at the moment is usually
> relatively close to my workstation/X-terminal, whereas the compute
> server might be very far away, and may not even know about the printer
> I want to use. E.g., if I'm at home, and I use a client running on
> one of the machines in the office, the printer I typically want to use
> is my home printer, but the machine at the office does not know about
> it.
>
> It's even more extreme if I run programs on servers of other
> organizations, which may be physically very far away, and where we
> don't want everyone on that server to be able to print on our local
> printers, nor do I want to bother the server's admin with configuring
> our local printer on that server.
>
> So it would be a good idea to piggyback printing onto one of the
> typical connections between the user and the compute server, i.e.,
> either X or ssh.

The thing is, X wants to move stuff to your workstation, not nearby
workstations.

Your example of being able to print at home is one that resonates with
me -- except that I've got two desktops and two laptops at home, and
only one of the four has a printer. Tunnelling IPP over ssh,
similarly to how we tunnel X, does have some appeal, thnough...

At work, we use print servers, so it's not at all uncommon for me to
run a program on one computer, show its gui on my workstation, and
print on yet another machine.

> AFAIK there was some work on printing in some X Consortion version of
> X; googling for it, I find mentions of:
>
> |X Print Extension Protocol
> |X Version 11, Release 6.4
> |
> |X Print Extension Library
> |X Version 11, Release 6.4
>
> However, according to this
> extension is deprecated.

Wasn't aware it was now deprecated, but I sure never had any luck with
it...