Wayne,

You are quite correct that a google search using your search terms 
immediately provided the answer to my question, which arose from a bug 
in the documentation (#512098). I assumed (wrongly) that CUPS was 
broken, and so googled with the wrong search terms. 

The tools you point to were of little help, for none of them 
explicitly said that dvi printing requires cups-bsd rather than the 
cups package, although now that I know that to be the case, I can see 
that the documentation might imply that. While the error report 
said it could not find the lpr command, a) the documentation 
with the cups package did not tell me it _didn't_ supply lpr, which I 
incorrectly assumed it did, and b) that dvi couldn't find the printer 
configuration file when in fact I knew it existed led me to assume 
that CUPS was broken and for that reason could not find lpr.  

The Debian Reference was new to me and looks to be very helpuful, but 
I did a quick look for this issue in it, and it does not explicitly 
say (at first glance), that the cups package does not supply lpr 
and so does not support printing with dvi. It simply gives an example 
of printing using lpr.   

I understand your frustration with questions raised by folks who do 
not trouble to figure things out for themselves. But the highest 
virtue of an educator, as you call yourself, is forebearance. As any 
educator will tell you, people often don't pursue things on their own 
because they lack the general framework needed to define the question 
in a way that implies what is a meaningful answer, lack a sense of 
direction in which a question needs to be pursued, or do not fully 
understand the documentation even when the answer stares them in the 
face.  

I did struggle with the problem before raising the question, such as 
googling, looking at the cups package documentation, and looking to 
see if there was a PRINTER variable. Why AUCTeX/dvi relies on the BSD 
command instead of vanilla CUPS is still a mystery. Everything else 
managed to print with the cups package (one app. didn't, but since I 
normally use it with a2ps, I didn't pursue the reason). I was focused 
on whether I had installed CUPS properly and whether it was a broken 
installation. In retrospect, the situation seems simple enough, but 
that is with the wisdom of hindsight. 

Haines Brown   

  


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