cups, and hplip too, fail to recognize printer when I try to print

[Carmel NY]

The problem has nothing to do with proprietary drivers, etcetera but rather
the extremely fractured system of printing on non MS Windows based systems. I
have had extensive conversations with representatives from Brother and while
they do include PPD's and other assorted files for some of their printers,
they claim it is just not financially feasible to do so for all their
products, ie, scanners, copiers, etcetera due to the multiple platforms that
they would be required to support. They need only support one when working
with MS Windows, If the *nix community would come together and devise one
consistent printing system, they would be inclined to support it. They
informed me that due to the way FreeBSD likes to due things differently than
anyone else, they would never in all likely hood support it directly. This is
not a problem with the manufacturers, it is a fundamental flaw in the way
*nix handles printers, copiers, FAX machines, scanners, etcetera.

You might want to check out this URL:
<http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting>

Specifically this portion for starters:

PDF is the standard print job format from CUPS 1.6.x on

All important desktop applications (GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE,
LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, ...) send print jobs in PDF
and not in PostScript any more by default. In addition, a complete CUPS
filter chain to process print jobs in PDF is available and used.

-- 
Carmel