Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Rich <rich@example.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: terminal only for two weeks
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2025 04:15:53 -0000 (UTC)
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Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
> Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> I use qpdf. Has sessions, and is fairly light weight.
>>
>> Wonderful!  Pretty nice as well.  Very easy to use.  Now, it can't seem
>> to use lpr for printing?  That's how I print. :) But I can workaround it
>> by figuring out how to tell lpr to tell my printer to only print a few
>> pages I'm interested in and then use the command line.  Thanks for
>> mentioning qpdf.
> 
> I suspect I imagine wrong how things actually work. I thought perhaps
> there would be a command line such as ``lpr --pages 7-14''.  Now I
> believe a program like evince generates a PostScript of the pages you
> asked it to and then sends this complete PostScript document of the
> pages you requested to a pipe or file on disk that lpr sends to the
> printer.

Yes, selecting "which pages" happens before the result gets sent to lpr 
(or cups).

> But I think I can find a program that takes page ranges and 
> transformations like scaling and produces a PostScript document that 
> I can send to lpr, so I can use qpdfview and use the command line to 
> print stuff out.

If you are dealing with pdf files, then pdftk 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDFtk> works very well of doing various 
transforms on pdf files (including selecting a subset of pages, that do 
not have to all be contiguous).

If you have actual postscript files, you can use ghostscript from the 
command line to "distill" them to pdf (note ghostscrpts "pdfwrite" 
output driver) and then use pdftk for further transforming.