Enable Passthrough Printing Support in Gnome-Terminal
Submitted by Dan Mahoney
Link to original bug (#613854)
Description
Apologies if this should be considered part of "VTE" -- it involves some amount of terminal emulation, but also parts of the gnome-subsystems.
(From a previous list-post, to which I got no replies).
I've been looking around for an answer to this feature -- in a few cases I found a user who asked this question but who had his answers closed out on him rather than being taken as a bug report (or a feature request).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/155935 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/234518
As I've got some English skills, I'll pose it.
I'd like to get passthrough-printing working in Gnome-terminal. I'm using 2.28.1 under ubuntu Karmic.
For those unaware, Passthrough Printing is a neat ability of terminal emulation applications to send a "printer on" and "printer off" ANSI escape code. It's found in most terminal emulators, up to and including Putty, SecureCRT, VtyNet, as well I believe as "xterm" and a few others. It's a holdover from the old days (think car rental dealerships) when there was a printer connected to a green-screen terminal.
Programs such as alpine, as well as "ansiprint" still make use of this. Screen has support for handling buffering in programs that support this. It's well-defined in termcap entries. If anyone likes, I can describe this feature in more detail, but in a nutshell, it goes something like "when you get this code, buffer text in an alternate buffer, when that buffer exceeds X lines, send it to $printer". Several other terminal applications also feature an option to flush the buffer.
I'm more than willing to help contribute my experience getting this to work on other platforms. I'm not a coder, but I am rather experienced with the terminals.
If there's an alternate terminal app I could be using, please let me know what it is. Xterm just isn't configurable enough and resizable enough (I can resize an xterm but I can't tweak the other options easily, such as font size or colors) to work for me.
This is probably a fairly easy feature to add, for what it's worth...just buffer when you see those escape codes, and chunk it to a print dialog.
This is somewhat related to bug 440127, where the user complains that printing needs to be enabled. What I think that user is asking for are functions like "print screen" or "print selection", much of the work here is the same, because it would need to tie gnome-terminal to the printing subsystem, be able to access default printers, etc.
Version: 2.28.x