[PLUG] LJ5 Envelope Printing

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Sat Jan 26 14:51:17 UTC 2013


On Fri, 25 Jan 2013, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> The situation for printing envelopes has never been good; I suspect the
> people who write the programs don't use postal mail, or use european sized
> envelopes.

Keith,

   Also, strangely enough, HP no longer has (if they ever had) a driver for
the LJ 5; they do for 5L, 5M, etc. but not the basic 5. Despite their
building printers that last (at least, they used to do this) they drop
support for them to encouraga folks to dump a perfectly good printer and buy
a new one.

> I've used HP postscript printers for over a decade, so I finally buckled
> down and wrote the postscript for printing a simple envelope (yes, raw
> postscript).  And starting with a postscript file for a different
> recipient, I text edit the file to make a new file with some of the fields
> replaced.

   What a great idea! I have a book on PostScript and regularly use PSTricks
(which embeds PostScript in LaTeX) for vector drawings.

> The more "interesting" trick is printing labels.

   I used OO.o to set up pages of labels and saved them as .pdf files. I have
return address labels for home and business and shipping labels. These I
print with lpr from the command line.

> Here's an envelope example:

   Thanks! This I'll make work on my printer. Since I print envelopes so
infrequently, and always one at a time, this will do the job.

> Postscript is a weird but understandable programming language.  You
> can also feed it into CUPS and print to non-Postscript printers.

   I have a PS module in my LJ5.

> I don't suggest this to everyone, but it does point out that there
> are very simple ways to get these tasks done.  Rowboats, instead of
> giant aircraft carrier programs like Libre Office that do everything
> ... poorly.

   Allow me to introduce you to LyX <http://www.lyx.org/>. I very recently
read a comment from a LaTeX/LyX user who shares my views on LyX rather than
LaTeX: the difference is similar to coding in C or Python versus coding in
assembly language. I do 95% of my writing with LyX and insert raw LaTeX as
needed.

   Interestingly enough, until this past month I never had a client or agency
complain about the appearance of a TeX-compiled typeset document. One
client, who has to satisfy more senior management at the offices in a small
(1,400 people) northeastern Washington town, had me modify the appearance so
it would look more like a Word document! Sigh. They are rather provincial in
that office.

Rich




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