[Tutor] Printing data to a printer...

[Ken G.]

Rich Lovely wrote:
> 2010/1/2 Ken G. <beachkid at insightbb.com>:
>   
>> Wow, I looked and looked.  I can print out my program listing but can not
>> print the resulted data produced by the program.
>>
>> How do I print out on my USB printer the data output of my Python program I
>> ran in my Ubuntu terminal via Geany IDE?
>> I already wrote several programs using raw_input, files, sort, list, tuple
>> and I like Python!  Currently, I'm using Python 2.6.  In Liberty Basic, the
>> command was lprint.  For example:
>>
>>   print 2 + 2    #    display in terminal
>>
>>   lprint 2 + 2    #   print result to printer
>> TIA,
>>
>> Ken
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>>     
>
> There doesn't appear to be anything builtin to make it easy - on
> Linux, at least.  There are three options, as far as I can see.  I
> don't have a printer, so can't test either.
>
> First is to pipe the output from the program to a command line
> printing program.  This will mean that all of the data written to
> stdout is sent straight to the printer.  This can only be done at the
> command line, and will look something like
> $ python your_program.py | lpr
>
> Using this method, you can still send output to the console using
> sys.stderr.write()
>
> This is the traditional unix method, but is only really appropriate
> for your own scripts.
>
> The second option is to open a pipe to a program such as lpr from
> within python, using the subprocess module:
>
> import subprocess
> lpr =  subprocess.Popen("/usr/bin/lpr", stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
> lpr.stdin.write(data_to_print)
>
> The third option is to use a third party library.  The current linux
> printing system is called CUPS, so you can try searching the
> cheeseshop (pypi.python.org) or google for python cups packages.  The
> pypi gives one possibility:  http://www.pykota.com/software/pkipplib
>
> There is a fourth option, which might not even work: opening the
> printer device as a file-like object (I don't recommend trying this
> without doing a lot of research first):
>
> lp = open("/dev/lp0", "w")
> lp.write(data_to_print)
>
> Of course, all of this is very much os specific.  The first option
> will work in linux, osx and windows, but two and three will only work
> in linux and osx, however printing is considerably easier on windows,
> there is the win32print package that does (most of) the heavy lifting
> for you.  To be honest, I'm not even sure if option four will work
> _at_all_.
>
>   
I found a roundabout way of doing it.  Using IDLE, I ran the program as 
it is in the new "untitled window", resulting in having the output in 
the Python Shell window.  I use the Print command from that shell window. 

Thanks for your input.  It is much appreciated and I am printing it out 
for reference.

Ken
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