Fast personal printing _without_ CUPS

[John Levine]

>>I'm not a huge fan of CUPS, but at this point it's the best of a bad
>>lot.  I find the queueing useful, since I often print documents long
>>enough that I don't want to wait.
>
>I don't quite understand the issue you are raising john.

$ lpr foo
$ lpr bar
$ lpr baz

It will print the three files in a row, starting each when the previous
one is done.  Like, you know, a print queue.

>John are you saying that my documents, some of which *start out* as
>.PS files, are converted by CUPS to .PDF and thence (since I don't
>have any printers that speak PDF) the document is then converted
>*back* to Postscript for actual printing??

Seems that way, based on a little poking around.  If I use something
like evince, I think it will do whatever CUPS tells it to do.  If I
use the basic CUPS lpr command to print a .ps file, that's fast since
there's nothing smart enough to do something stupid.

>>I think this is a bug.
>
>If it is, then I think it may be a long-standing one.
>
>I did something very like what I just described doing on FreeBSD 8.2 also
>back on my old FreeBSD 7.0 system which I first installed maybe three years
>of more ago.

My recollection is that CUPS on FBSD 7 printed a lot faster, although
it also may have something to do with the fact that I used to use a
USB to parallel thing, and since then I scored a print server card on
ebay for about $15 and print over the network.  (There are other
computers on the network that other people print from, so this is an
overall win.)

R's,
John