Some Techical Stuff

Technical Overview

The essence of our plan involves the following goals:

• Trick Mac OS X to print to a phony PostScript printer. This gives us perfectly good, useable Postscript code, which we will use, even though Postscript doesn’t do anything good for our printers.
• Intercept the Postscript code from the high-level Mac OS, in order to handle it in the BSD subsystem.
• If necessary according to your own printing scenario, process the stolen Postscript through a program called GhostScript that is capable of converting PostScript/PDF into a variety of formats, including a language that your printer understands.
• Route the stolen GhostScript-generated code (or the untouched Postscript if applicable) to a real printer that the high-level Mac OS doesn’t even really need to know about.

These are the highlights of the steps we will take:

• Replace the Mac OS X.1 LPRIOM.plugin file with that from 10.04. This is because the newer version of the file supplied with Mac OS X 10.1 and Mac OS X 10.1.1, and Mac OS X 10.1.2 breaks the ability to use most NetInfo-added printers in the Print Center. This will be an optional step for those who are concerned about allowing localhost printing.
• Install AFL-GhostScript. This is because GhostScript will do the vast majority of our work. This is the program that will convert PostScript into the printer command language for your printer. You could also read about GhostScript to make it do other interesting things with PostScript files, if you care to. An example of this is using it as a distiller to create your own PDF files. This most likely will be a required step, but some of the scenarios don’t require GhostScript, particulary those printing to Postscript Level 2 printers.
• Use NetInfo Manager to define one or two Printers. This is because BSD doesn’t know about Print Center printers, and we need printers that BSD can know about. Also, Print Center doesn’t provide the ability to use filters, which are essential to our project. Conversely, however, we can add NetInfo printers to the Print Center. The first printer will be a phony printer that you will add to Print Center. It’s phony in the respect that it won’t actually print anything in its own right. It will provide the PostScript code that we need, as well as the hook we need to get our filter to run under BSD (i.e., this is how we steal the job from Print Center). The second printer will be used if you opt for IP instead of AppleTalk or SMB, and it will be a real printer that exists on the network, and this is where the stolen print job will ultimately be sent.
• Build our Spool Directories. Spool directories are needed by the LPD system in order to process files. These are essentially buffer areas for temporary file storage. Under Mac OS X, you generally don’t need to worry about such things, but since we’re doing this in BSD, we need to do things the BSD way.
• Add our printers to the Print Center. Really, we should only need to add one printer to the Print Center, and that’s the phony printer we will have defined in NetInfo. Once the phony printer has sent the job to our print filter (i.e., GhostScript), it will be removed from the Print Center’s list of jobs, despite the fact that the job may not really be done yet. This is because from the Print Center’s perspective, the job is done. The Print Center doesn’t know what games we’re playing down deep in BSD.
• Use the terminal to build the filter. This will be a script file containing the Unix commands that process the stolen job from the high-level Mac OS X. The filter will send Postscript code to GhostScript, and in turn send GhostScript’s output to the real printer.
• Print! Gratification, finally!