using network printers, what non-cups things exist?

[Mike Marchywka]

I spent most of yesterday trying to get an HP OfficeJet to print from 16.04
despite
having had good luck previously using it and an older DeskJet as a scanner 
with hp-scan. It turned out that
one problem was the cartridges- the color test page printed something
and then apparently the black and white text failed to print. 
However, there were a lot of "failed filter" messages and using
lpr with raw output at least got a piece of paper to feed. I only
have a few peripherals at a time and print rarely. I don't
really need any of this stuff. Is there any way to just print
a file as a one liner?

cat file_to_print | some_conversion_prgram | favorite_socket_output_program


I think at some point it complained about a missing foomatic component
and installing that took out my cups. Reinstalling from the cups.org
website allowed me to update during recovery but I've now
got a bunch of things like net-snmp and hplip projects that 
even after installing only seem to be found by each other by setting
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the project lib dirs... 

Right now I think if I change the cartridge it will probably work
but I still have a mess and a set of conversion programs, or just
one, and maybe with a device driver, and something to just
dump the converted file to a jetdirect port or something
would be great. I don't need a print queue, if I'm really 
in a hurry there is always "&" lol.

I was also horrified to find that the hp-xxx utilities seem to
require a gui in many cases. 

Any comments?

Thanks.


-- 

mike marchywka
306 charles cox
canton GA 30115
USA, Earth 
marchywka at hotmail.com
404-788-1216
ORCID: 0000-0001-9237-455X