Capture virtual printer output on linux

Question

I'm writing a Java screen-scraping application for a 3270 mainframe and rather than scroll through page after page of 80x24 chars I'd like to output all pages to a printer and then capture and parse the printer output.

The 3270 client has a print option, so I just need to virtualise a printer device and then somehow capture the output. Has anyone achieved this in Linux before?

Answer 1

You probably want to create a lpd-queue for this purpose and then hook into that.

Answer 2

If this is 3270 via VT100 you can issue VT100 print capture commands at the terminal. Otherwise, as already answered you can enable LPD and put a filter on it to tee it to a file.