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Re: [TCLUG:7924] RE: List of Printers



On Thu, 26 Aug 1999, Trainor, Kevin T. wrote:

> 	This is interesting. Not too long ago I went to the Small
> Business Computer Expo and asked the HP reps (not just the sales
> droids but the tech rep on site) about Linux drivers for the
> DeskJets, and they all denied that such things existed- "but we
> are looking into it." What's the deal? Obviously there are
> drivers, but do you have to go find them on linux.org/Freshmeat
> somewhere, or do most distributions have built-in modules for the
> HP printers?

HP made a booboo.  They predicted that the HP DeskJets would only be
purchased for home PC's that use Windows as an operating system.  They
developed the PPA protocol, trying to provide the user a more
hold-my-hand approach to printer management.  They assumed that anyone
who ran Unix were using their more expensive color laser printers
rather than the wimpy deskjets.  So, they never created the management
tools for the HP Deskjets for Unixes.  Well, the current PPA driver
isn't really a driver (unless you're talking about the commercial
version of ghostscript).  The way you print to HP printers is by
getting the PBM2PPA tool.  You will need to have the printer attached
locally and have ghostscript (gs) installed.  The sequence of events
for printing to the PPA DeskJets is:

	1) Convert the document to postscript (if needed)
		- ascii2ps
		- enscript
		- etc...
	2) Convert the postscript to a PBM file
		- ghostscript
	3) Convert the PBM file to PPA and send it off to the printer.

I don't remember the site, but do a search on freshmeat for 'pbm2ppa'

Later!

    ^chewie

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