How to setup an ascii text-only printer in OS X

Question

Is it possible to setup a printer equivalent to the Windows 'generic ascii text-only printer' in Mac OS X.

I cannot find anything about it within the current cups drivers docs. But I think there has been one in the early days, isn't it?

The goal is to print to a file with generic ascii only.

Answer 1

I believe you can do this with the lpr command. For example:

echo "Hello world!" | lpr

Will print a single page with Hello world! written on it. If you have a plain text file named print-me.txt, you can also do:

lpr < print-me.txt

to have lpr read from the file and print it out the same way. There are lots of options you can provide to lpr to change options: check out man lpr for more info. (lpr can also print PDF documents!)