On 27/02/2012 22:24, Polytropon wrote:
On Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:29:12 +0100, Jerome Herman wrote:
Not at all, the web admin for adding a printer is basically an html
version of lpadmin. It is just easier with the web site.
Easier as in: It leaves _essential_ options aside so that
you can't perform some of the tasks. :-)
Technically speaking, it doesn't leaves essential options aside, it just
forgets to mention them. But I get your point.
OK this means the ppd does not handle everything. Might get a little
complicated.
When I use the foo2qpdl-wrapper which I assume does use
the same PPD file, it works as intended.
Nope, the wrapper is just used to convert ps to QPDL in a plain file.
The PPD does a lot more, including a bit of dialog with the printer to
make sure it is configured correctly. Most of the time it also helps
handling different parameters such as paper size and orientation, color
or B&W etc.
They did, then they got bought by Apple...
I should make myself more familiar with the command line
tool. Still I hope I won't need CUPS anytime soon. :-)
No, please don't blame CUPS, it is earnestly trying to cope with
everything thrown at him (stupid printers, gnome DBus autoconfig, Apple
Mac OSX and so on), and it is doing a fairly good job at it.
I know that printing currently isn't as easy as I (with
my simple mind) assume. I've been using CUPS in the _past_
without major trouble, and even "impossible" things (like
using parallel dotmatrix printers) were easily configurable
even through the web interface. Seems that some parts got
disimproved to please a certain audience...
Well Apple way of handling devices : if it doesn't work the way we want,
it doesn't exist.
I for one
do not want to go back to the time where one had to learn 2 lines long
LPD command just to print in color, double side, with an ICM profile.
I have several printers for varying _how_ to print. However,
I like the idea of selecting duplex / no duplex in the
printing dialog (which I currently do by selecting a different
"virtual" printer: Laserjet = b/w two-sided, Laserjet-nodup =
b/w single-sided, Samsung = color single-sided).
Normally that is what PPD is for, giving you a bit of control on all
those parameters, so you do not have to create dozens of config per
printer. (This said quite a lot of my users love to have dozens of
configure for one printer, even under windows and mac. They prefer
choosing a printer called Graphic_A3_Color_2side than having to choose
options themselves)
Getting back to your problem. Apparently you are using an old version of
foo2qpdl, you may want to grab it from the web site directly and compile
it by hand (One of the very rare case where using the default
package/port is not a good idea at all)
You can find the howto here : http://foo2qpdl.rkkda.com/
You will need to download and link the ICM profile to have acceptable
print quality. The latest PPD is 24 874 bytes in size.
I will try that. I have installed the packages
foo2zjs-20110609
foomatic-db-20090530_2
foomatic-db-engine-4.0.7,2
gutenprint-foomatic-5.2.4_2
where foo2qpdl and foo2qpdl-wrapper come from.
I'm happy that I now have the "fallback method" of stopping
CUPS, starting lpd, and using -PSamsung in order to use the
color printer (not often required, it's my _first_ one, I've
never needed one, really).
Using a Linksys Wireless-G WPS54GU2 print server (WLAN, LAN,
USB, parallel) - following Jerry's suggestion - I'll try tp
get rid of the USB cable at the next step. Wireless printing
isn't urgently needed (as I'm happily wired here), but real
networking is much better than this local fiddling with USB
(so I can print to the color printer from all of my systems
when it's _real_ networked, just as the HP Laserjet 4000d
which even runs its own lpd "server").
On small printers, nothing beats socket connections. But the USB to
ethernet transform can be quite tricky sometimes. Usually QPDL is well
supported, it is after all a real interpreter.
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