Re: [OT] printing question
So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive ... I got a Samsung ML-2571N for well under $100 at Fry's something like a year ago; granted that was a sale price, dunno regular. It speaks PostScript and lpd, so no need to bother with drivers or CUPS; all it needs is a printcap entry. (BTW it also works seamlessly from MacOS X.) One small caution: there is also an ML-2571 without the N -- it may have a different letter -- which is not networked, dunno if that one handles PostScript. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 10:49 -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: Time to buy a new printer. I don't print much from FreeBSD; but the need occasionally arises. Most of my printing is done while using Mac OS X. The Epson Artisan 800 is looking awfully nice; but it's not in the Linux printing database yet (http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi). Question: Since Mac OS X uses CUPS, if I share the printer on the Mac, will I need to worry about FreeBSD compatibility of the printer? I only need printing functions (not scan, etc) for the FreeBSD computer. My understanding of this may be flawed, but from what I read years ago you should be able to use a pass thru filter (driver) and let the Mac do the hard work. It may be a slower way to print though, but based on your outline of the quantity you do print it should suffice. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:49:44AM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: Time to buy a new printer. I don't print much from FreeBSD; but the need occasionally arises. Most of my printing is done while using Mac OS X. The Epson Artisan 800 is looking awfully nice; but it's not in the Linux printing database yet (http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi). Question: Since Mac OS X uses CUPS, if I share the printer on the Mac, will I need to worry about FreeBSD compatibility of the printer? I only need printing functions (not scan, etc) for the FreeBSD computer. I'm not sure that apple uses a non-modified CUPS. It is conceivable that they have incorporated extra (not open) drivers that aren't in the standard distribution. If you want to be safe, buy a printer that understands PostScript. That will work on FreeBSD (and all other UNIX variants). Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725) pgpoc4JVsOyd7.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 07:51:47PM +0100, Roland Smith wrote: On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:49:44AM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: Time to buy a new printer. I don't print much from FreeBSD; but the need occasionally arises. Most of my printing is done while using Mac OS X. The Epson Artisan 800 is looking awfully nice; but it's not in the Linux printing database yet (http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi). Question: Since Mac OS X uses CUPS, if I share the printer on the Mac, will I need to worry about FreeBSD compatibility of the printer? I only need printing functions (not scan, etc) for the FreeBSD computer. I'm not sure that apple uses a non-modified CUPS. It is conceivable that they have incorporated extra (not open) drivers that aren't in the standard distribution. MacOS X will share a printer with Windows. I don't know how the driver thing is negotiated. The Mac may happily accept Postscript and then do whatever is needed to print. If you want to be safe, buy a printer that understands PostScript. That will work on FreeBSD (and all other UNIX variants). Sounds like the OP is looking for color. If BW is enough my favorite inexpensive printer is the Brother HL-5250DN. Speaks Postscript-clone, PCL-5 and PCL-6. Direct network connection so each computer speaks directly to the printer. Duplex. About 25 ppm. Third party toner reloads cost about $25 for 5,000 pages. The printer sells for $150 to $250 depending on sales and whether you can find a refurbished unit. Years ago I had access to an HP 5000N that would print photo quality matte (not glossy) BW on plain paper. Not quite sure what it is about the Brother (or printer drivers because this was pre-MacOS X) but I enjoyed wonderful cheap BW prints off the HP but the Brother isn't nearly as good. Text and line graphics are excellent. -- David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:49:44AM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: Time to buy a new printer. I don't print much from FreeBSD; but the need occasionally arises. Most of my printing is done while using Mac OS X. The Epson Artisan 800 is looking awfully nice; but it's not in the Linux printing database yet (http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi). Question: Since Mac OS X uses CUPS, if I share the printer on the Mac, will I need to worry about FreeBSD compatibility of the printer? I only need printing functions (not scan, etc) for the FreeBSD computer. Your best bet for printer compatibility is to ensure that it's available as a network device rather than having to connect to it directly, and that it's a Postscript printer. If you want to get a printer and connect it directly to your Mac, and you're sure it'll work with your Mac, then you should be able to share it with the rest of the network without problems -- as long as it's a Postscript printer. If it isn't, you may have to do some digging to determine whether other computers on the network will be able to use the shared printer at all, including FreeBSD systems. Alas, I know basically nothing about the Epson Artisan 800. I'm happy with my HP laser printer connected directly to the network. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Albert Camus: An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. pgpeTq55kbEGs.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Chad Perrin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your best bet for printer compatibility is to ensure that it's available as a network device rather than having to connect to it directly, and that it's a Postscript printer. If you want to get a printer and connect it directly to your Mac, and you're sure it'll work with your Mac, then you should be able to share it with the rest of the network without problems -- as long as it's a Postscript printer. If it isn't, you may have to do some digging to determine whether other computers on the network will be able to use the shared printer at all, including FreeBSD systems. Alas, I know basically nothing about the Epson Artisan 800. I'm happy with my HP laser printer connected directly to the network. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Albert Camus: An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. Thanks to all for the advice. So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive. It may be worth the inconvenience of sharing drive space and printing from the Mac via VNC window. ;-) Now, if I had money to waste.. I just discovered that those really cool, wide format printers used at many photo printing shops are postscript printers Imagine the font size you could use on a 20x30 memo. Andrew ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [OT] printing question
On Behalf Of Andrew Gould Time to buy a new printer. I don't print much from FreeBSD; but the need occasionally arises. Most of my printing is done while using Mac OS X. The Epson Artisan 800 is looking awfully nice; but it's not in the Linux I can't help with the setup issues, as I don't use printers from those systems. However, I do have a recommendation for you. I recently purchased a new HP CP1518ni Color Laser at Sam's Club for less than US$300. It has the Jet Direct network interface, includes Postscript and has worked flawlessly on my home network. HP provides Linux drivers in their hpiplib package. Once it is on the network, setup can be completed from a browser. The four toner cartridges run about US$70 each at Staples, but will print around 2200 pages, which is many times the number of pages for the equivalent cost in ink cartridges. We expect the overall cost to be significantly less than a DeskJet with all of the refills it would eat. I suspect we will have covered the difference in the printer prices before we burn through the 700 pages the original cartridges should provide. Plus the pages don't smear when we handle them with damp fingers. HTH, Bob McConnell ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 02:00:03PM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive. It may be worth the inconvenience of sharing drive space and printing from the Mac via VNC window. ;-) The reason Postscript printers tend to be expensive is that they tend to be high quality. Only cheap, crappy desktop printers of the sort that people buy for their home MS Windows systems, then replace when they run out of ink because replacement ink cartridges cost more than half the cost of a brand new printer, tend to be incapable of using Postscript. There are exceptions, of course, in the form of very expensive, highly specialized printers that are unsuitable to home or even most office use and don't understand Postscript. . . . but generally speaking, if it doesn't speak Postscript, it's probably a heap of junk anyway. That's my experience, at least. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Naguib Mahfouz: You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. pgpHkkkMQ4gGE.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 02:00:03PM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Chad Perrin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your best bet for printer compatibility is to ensure that it's available as a network device rather than having to connect to it directly, and that it's a Postscript printer. If you want to get a printer and connect it directly to your Mac, and you're sure it'll work with your Mac, then you should be able to share it with the rest of the network without problems -- as long as it's a Postscript printer. If it isn't, you may have to do some digging to determine whether other computers on the network will be able to use the shared printer at all, including FreeBSD systems. Alas, I know basically nothing about the Epson Artisan 800. I'm happy with my HP laser printer connected directly to the network. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Albert Camus: An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. Thanks to all for the advice. So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive. It may be worth the inconvenience of sharing drive space and printing from the Mac via VNC window. ;-) Now, if I had money to waste.. I just discovered that those really cool, wide format printers used at many photo printing shops are postscript printers Those are hit-or-miss as well. Our HP plotter at work, for example: when printing actual images (JPEG, GIF, etc.), you have to configure the printer driver to think that the printer is the exact size/resolution of the image you want to print, otherwise it prints half the image, then in mid-line starts looping back to the top of the image, and loses all concept of paper size. Awesome. Imagine the font size you could use on a 20x30 memo. I can tell you that my Brother MFC-5860CN printer, despite being a AIO network printer, does not work with FreeBSD -- even lpd does not work with it. The behaviour is repeatable: sending data to either the LPD port or the JetDirect emulation port results in the printer showing Receiving data (or something like that) on the LCD, then the printer just locks up. Supposedly the network data stream has to be encoded in some way. Brother offers numerous Linux packages, and Linux binaries, which take care of this for you, but nothing for FreeBSD. In fact, their FAQ/KB even answers Do you support FreeBSD? with something that resembles No, we do not, and we will not, go away. You can find tons of web pages on this printer, and other Brother printers; tons of Linux success stories, otherwise nothing but tears. This printer does work very well in Windows, but not so well with OS X (unless its hooked up to the USB port, where supposedly it works fine). I have no interest in CUPS (bloated and overcomplex), and no interest in Linux emulation (lolcat style: DO NOT WANT), so I stick with printing under Windows. Prior to the Brother, I had an HP DeskJet AIO, and I literally threw it in the trash due to Windows drivers bloat galore. There's a famous problem with their drivers where every time you print, it launches an EXE, but then never kills the EXE off. Print 10 times, you've got 10 EXEs lingering around in memory. Imagine this in a corp environment where there's a Windows print server involved -- totally unacceptable. I'm afraid to sell/dispose of my Brother and get an HP LaserJet because of their drivers. The point I'm trying to make: do not think that just because a printer has an Ethernet port that it will work with FreeBSD. The other part of the problem is that FreeBSD's USB stack isn't so great. I assume that just because a USB printer attaches as ulpt(4) doesn't mean it'll print properly (e.g. needs an I/O driver of some kind), but I could be wrong. I don't know what your budget is, but US$300-400 for an AIO printer that works with your setup, and in a multi-OS environment, is well worth it. If folks out there are using network or USB printers with FreeBSD RELENG_7 (without Linux emulation; CUPS is acceptable for others, just not me :-) )), compiling a list of compatible hardware would be beneficial. It seems that most HP LaserJet printers with network I/O work well, assuming the model supports some form of PostScript. -- | Jeremy Chadwickjdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] printing question
Andrew Gould [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive. It may be worth the inconvenience of sharing drive space and printing from the Mac via VNC window. ;-) It's not clear to me that anyone posting here had tried printing to a printer on a recent Mac. I haven't, even though I've got one in my house. I know that the Mac's printer shows up more or less automagically on the FreeBSD (CUPS) machines on the LAN, but I don't think I've tried actually printing to it. -- Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Andrew Gould wrote: So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive. Not always: http://wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/usedlasers.pdf Thanks to Ghostscript, PCL printers will also work. It may be worth the inconvenience of sharing drive space and printing from the Mac via VNC window. ;-) That would be the easiest way, and probably the highest quality if you're printing images. Gutenprint will probably drive the Epson Artisan 800 soon if it doesn't already, but you might want to reconsider after this review: http://reviews.cnet.com/multifunction-devices/epson-artisan-800/4505-3181_7-33241287.html?tag=mncol;txt -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Warren Block [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 18 Nov 2008, Andrew Gould wrote: So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive. Not always: http://wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/usedlasers.pdfhttp://wonkity.com/%7Ewblock/docs/usedlasers.pdf Thanks to Ghostscript, PCL printers will also work. It may be worth the inconvenience of sharing drive space and printing from the Mac via VNC window. ;-) That would be the easiest way, and probably the highest quality if you're printing images. Gutenprint will probably drive the Epson Artisan 800 soon if it doesn't already, but you might want to reconsider after this review: http://reviews.cnet.com/multifunction-devices/epson-artisan-800/4505-3181_7-33241287.html?tag=mncol;txt -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA Thanks for the links. The artisan appears to be a real mixed bag. Andrew ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT - printing question
On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 07:43:44 -0500 Andrew Gould [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a postscript printer. I can send the output of text files to the printer; but the printer won't eject the page until I send enough text to fill the page. Is there a standard page-break or eject page command? http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/printing-troubleshooting.html Andreas -- GnuPG key : 0x2A573565|http://www.gnupg.org/howtos/de/ Fingerprint: 925D 2089 0BF9 8DE5 9166 33BB F0FD CD37 2A57 3565 pgpqUKgz2CTsp.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: OT - printing question
On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Andrew Gould wrote: I have a postscript printer. I can send the output of text files to the printer; but the printer won't eject the page until I send enough text to fill the page. Is there a standard page-break or eject page command? If you're sending PS, it's showpage. But it sounds like you're sending plain text. In that case, the printer will eject the page when it gets 60 lines or a form feed (\f, 0x0c). It may be just as easy to convert your text to PS before sending. /usr/ports/print/enscript-letter (or -A4) is handy for that. -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
