UNIX BASED DISTRIBUTED PRINTING IN A DIVERSE ENVIRONMENT
William E. Johnston, Dennis E. Hall · 1986
Experiences using the Berkeley UNIX line printer spooler mechanism to provide distributed, mostly laser printer based, typesetting and graphics output to a geographically dispersed, heterogeneous, set of host computers and users are described. The user interface is the usual set of UNIX commands, though the methodology employed is somewhat different from the usual. The user's environment is resolved on the local machine and the tasks of document formatting and device driving are relegated to dedicated server systems in order to remove these computer intensive tasks from the timesharing client, or user, systems. The details of the system are described, together with an analysis of performance issues and operational aspects.