Trying for a duplex printer

[Gary Jennejohn]

On Wed, 07 May 2008 14:43:32 -0400
Chuck Robey <chuckr at chuckr.org> wrote:

[snip Kyocera FS-1030D]
> Thanks, Gary.  Took me quite a while to find this baby, because it seems that
> Kyocera's main site doesn't acknowledge of the Kyocera-Mita's products.  I
> finally found out that it's a fairly big  monochrome laser.  I rather like the
> color I get from the cheaper inkjets, although I sure would rather get one with
> a FreeBSD driver.  Further, from what I could find, I couldn't tell if it was a
> postscript native printer, and I am dead-set against any postscript native
> printers, because I used to have one, and when compared to any innkset that must
> use a translator such as ghostscript, the postscript native printers are (or, at
> least used to be) dead slow.  Maybe it took them too long to transfer big
> postscript files, or maybe it took the internal processors too long to
> translate, I dunno, but when I had one of the original old HP laserjets with a
> postscript cartridge, and I converted to using ghostscript about a year after I
> got it, I was shocked that my print rate went up about 4-5 times as fast.  I
> could actually get the advertised print rates.
> 

Well, I have an ethernet card in it, so transfer times are not a problem.

This printer _emulates_ postscript quite well.  It actually supports other
modes.  Here's a list from the Technical Reference manual:

The printing systems emulate the operation of seven other printers:
  HP LaserJet (mode 6)
  HP 7550A (mode 8)
  IBM Proprinter X24E (mode 1)
  Epson LQ-850 (mode 5)
  Diablo 630 (mode 2)
  Standard line printer (mode 0)
  KPDL (mode 9) [PostScript compatible]

Supposedly it can do 22 ppm single sheet and 11 ppm duplex, but I've never checked
that.

> I suppose my next trick is to attempt to find out about glib's symbol
> versioning, enough so that it could be added to the linuxwrapper.  Then (I hope)
> I get the PIPS driver that exists for the Epson RX680.
> 

I wasn't trying to suggest that you get a FS-1030D.  I was just giving an
example of a printer which works with CUPS in duplex mode.

IMO the next trick would be to look for a PPD file for one of the printers
you have in mind.  If you find one then it would be simple to use CUPS.

---
Gary Jennejohn