[luau] The open-sourcing of PriceBusters

[Ray Strode]

> Most of our poles and receipt printers are handled through the telnet
> session and this MC/PC escape sequence.  Thing is, some, not all, of my
> poles are not pass-through parallel port poles, so they don't work with this
> "local" file.  They are serial poles and the telnet software we use now
> won't let us pass jobs off to the serial port. So, on the server we define
> this remote printer which is actually a windows pole display.  In the POS
> software there are configuration settings for each inidividual register.
> For the registers with the serial port pole I tell Counterpoint not to pass
> pole print jobs through the local parallel port, I tell it to print pole
> display jobs to the defined queue.
I understand now.  Thanks for the good explanation.


> In most cases this is exactly right.  The dealer that I took Pricebuster's
> over from made LOTS of mistakes.  One was selling her a bunch of serial port
> poles that she could not use.  At some point last year I figured out that
> they could be salvaged as samba printers.  What you observe is true-samba
> printers are not needed.  In all of my future stores I will aquire the right
> poles.  However, I do have some samba poles requiring this band-aid
> approach.  Good observations, Ray.
Okay, I don't think we'll need to use this approach.  It complicates
things quite a bit and I think we can get by without it.  All we need to
do is have the output sent to our own custom lpr program that basically
sends the data out the serial port and parallel port directly (which
would be simple enough, because these are just line printers after
all).  The other option is to make our custom lpr program just a wrapper
that calls some existing print queuing program twice...once for each
printer.

--Ray