Printer selector switches

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 01:14:05PM -0400, Harry G wrote:
>I am using Suse 7.3, and have to use 3 different printers (all 
>parrallel) depending on the job  One HP Laserjet 6L, a Epson Stylus 
>Color 900, and a Okidata Microline 320 for multi-part forms.  Would a 
>printer selector switche work well under this situation?
>
>Would I have to reboot if I changed to a different printer?  I know 
>that under some programs, i.e. Mozilla, it always uses the default 
>printer, but I won't be doing much printing from  Mozilla.

I've found the best way to handle this is to use a network print server
with multiple parallel ports.  I don't know how the Epson would work on one
of these because I think it may use the bidirectional capabilities of the
parallel port.  This shouldn't be a problem with the HP or Oki320.

Network printers are easy to configure, and appear as separate printers to
Linux so selecting isn't a problem.

Radio Shack used to make a two-printer parallel switch that would select
the printer by sending an escape sequence at the beginning of the print
jobs, and this worked OK by setting up multiple printers with printer
interface scripts that sent the appropriate string at the beginning of the
job.  I'm sure there are similar switches available today, but the
programming's a bit more difficult than using network printers.

We use the HP JetDirects most frequently for this although there are
probably less expensive alternatives available (some of the ones we've used
were made by companies that no longer exist -- but then this may soon
describe HP :-).

Bill
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