Secure Global Desktop Administration Guide > Printing > Configuring Secure Global Desktop print job conversion
With Secure Global Desktop printing, print jobs are sent from the application server to the Secure Global Desktop server, and from there to the client device, which sends them to the printer. When print jobs arrive at the Secure Global Desktop server, they may need to be converted to a format suitable for the client device's printer.
Note A print job from a Windows 2000/2003 application server is never converted because it is assumed to be correctly formatted.
To decide whether a print job needs to be converted, the Secure Global Desktop server
checks the printertypes.txt and the printerinfo.txt files to
see whether the format needed by the client device's printer matches the format used by the application server.
If the format matches, the print job is forwarded to the client device printer without any conversion.
If the formats do not match, the Secure Global Desktop server converts the print job to the right format
using the tta_print_converter script.
So, to ensure that print jobs are formatted correctly, you may have to:
printertypes.txt and printerinfo.txt files; and/ortta_print_converter script.How you do this is described below.
For UNIX clients, Secure Global Desktop uses the printerinfo.txt file
to determine the printer type. For all other clients, it uses the printertypes.txt file. You can edit these files:
Note If you add a new printer type, you may also have to edit
the tta_print_converter script.
If there is insufficient detail or inaccurate mappings in these files, Secure Global Desktop may convert print jobs unnecessarily or not at all.
How you edit the printerinfo.txt file is described in
detail in Configuring printing for UNIX clients.
Note The printertypes.txt file used for non-UNIX clients also contains
entries for UNIX. This is used only as a fallback and simply maps UNIX types
to printer types.
For Windows client devices, the printertypes.txt file
contains maps printer drivers (for example,
pscript.dll) to printer types (for example, PostScript).
For Apple Macintosh clients it maps printer names to printer types.
The printertypes.txt file can be found in the /opt/tarantella/etc/data
directory and it includes comments to help you customize it. By default, the file includes mappings for PostScript, PCL and text-only printers.
Note You must be logged on as root to edit this file.
On Microsoft Windows systems, to find out the name of the printer driver used by a client device, print a test page and check the Driver Name field.
To add support for a new printer type, add lines following the same pattern. For example:
MyNewType=mydriver.drv
Rusty Spanner's client device, cairo, runs Windows
2000 and its default printer is PCL. The printer driver in use is
unidrv.dll.
The Windows 2000 section in printertypes.txt has the
following:
[Windows2000] PostScript=pscript5.dll;pscript.dll PCL=rasdd.dll PostScript=*
As there's no specific match for unidrv.dll, the
final entry applies: PostScript. This means that when Rusty prints,
print jobs are incorrectly converted to PostScript before being sent to cairo.
To fix this, edit printertypes.txt as root to add a
specific match for unidrv.dll:
PCL=rasdd.dll;unidrv.dll
Now Secure Global Desktop correctly identifies the printer configured on cairo, and print jobs are converted to PCL for that client device.
The tta_print_converter script converts print jobs from the
format used by the application server to the format required by the client
device and is determined by the printer type. By default, the script
recognizes PostScript and non-PostScript formats. The script uses Ghostscript,
available separately, to convert print jobs from PostScript to PCL.
You can edit tta_print_converter:
The shell function GetDataType determines the print job
format from the first 128 bytes of the print job. The data is
URL-encoded: for example, the % character is encoded as
%25.
The script is passed the client device's printer type, recognized
using the printertypes.txt file. The printer types are
always in upper case, for example POSTSCRIPT or
MYNEWTYPE.
The tta_print_converter script can be found in the /opt/tarantella/bin/scripts
directory and it includes comments to help you customize it.
If you experience problems printing to a PCL printer, the
tta_print_converter script contains some code which has been
commented out. You can use this code to see if this solves the problem.
Note You must be logged on as root to edit this script.
The tta_print_converter script uses Ghostscript to convert print jobs
from PostScript to PCL. For best results we recommend you download and
install the additional fonts.
When you install Secure Global Desktop, Secure Global Desktop Setup automatically detects Ghostscript if it is installed in one of the following locations:
/usr/local/bin/usr/bin/opt/sfw/bin/bin/usr/sbin/sbin/usr/lbinIf Ghostscript is installed elsewhere, you must run the
prtinstall.en.sh script
with the --gsbindir option to tell Secure Global Desktop where to find Ghostscript.
If Ghostscript is not installed, you must install it and then run
the prtinstall.en.sh script.
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