Re: [despammed] Re: [tlug] printer won't print

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Evans <peter@example.com> writes:

<HELP!>

First see if you can get your hands on the source, preferably an SRPM.
Simply building it on the target host often gives good results.  (Sad,
but true.)  This being a Japanese company, you probably can't, but
it's worth trying.

(Along those lines, avoid Brother like the plague; Russ Nelson spent a
year trying to get specs out of Brother so he could write a driver for
on of their all-in-one devices, and they simply refused since they
already offer a (non-working, for Russ at least) Linux driver.)

    Peter> Years ago, back in the MS-DOS era, there were no major
    Peter> worries about new, unsupported printers. You'd just use a
    Peter> driver for an older, cruder printer. I don't hear any of
    Peter> that these days: instead, I'm told that _the_ drivers are
    Peter> on a CD, and newer ones are available for download.

Of course you don't hear that.  The paying customers don't want to
hear that anymore.  But it's still true.  I don't know what Mac OS X
10.1 or 10.2 or 10.3 used to drive my HP LJet 6 or my Canon S700, and
don't care (they just work ;-).  But my Linux boxen use Ghostscript
drivers for the LJ4 and a UPP driver for the Canon F800 (or so)
respectively, and although the print quality of the S700 leaves a bit
to be desired if I print more than about 3 pages running, it's no
worse than the Windose drivers on my wife's Vaio, so I guess it's a
hardware issue.

    Peter> 1260
    Peter> 1000
    Peter> 1760

Try these first, in that order.  Expect glitches from the larger
numbers as features not present in your hardware are exercised.

    Peter> 600
    Peter> 660
    Peter> 800
    Peter> 8AI

Then try those in reverse order.

    Peter> Do you think there'd be any point pretending that the
    Peter> printer was one of these?

Yes.  You might want to try experimenting directly with Ghostscript,
since you can set the device driver from the command line with
-sDEVICE=<drivername> (syntax for UPP driver names is different, but I
don't think that handles laser printers).  You should have the
Ghostscript test files around somewhere, or use any random .ps file
you might have around (Netscape/Moz/FFux will produce those).  The
GIMP might also allow you to select the printer from a menu.


-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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