HP Officejet Printer

[doug]

On Fri, 7 Jul 2006, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "dick hoogendijk" <dick at nagual.st>
> To: "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 8:53 AM
> Subject: Re: HP Officejet Printer
>
>
>> On 05 Jul Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>>>
>>> http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-OfficeJet_4300
>>>
>>> "...these printers are supported by the "hpijs" driver beginning from
>>> version 1.3. The driver supports resolutions only up to 600 dpi, head
>>> alignment settings stored in the printer are not made use of, so use a
>>> one-cartridge (CMY) printing mode in case of mis-alignments...."
>>>
>>> "perfectly"?
>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "dick hoogendijk" <dick at nagual.st>
>>>> This printer works perfectly with apsfilter. The latter does /not/
>>>> need cups (luckely imho) but works very well with the standard unix
>>>> lpd.
>>
>> OK, the definition for perfectly does not agree with my statement.
>> Otoh, my laserjet uses 600dpi and that is (for normal use) quite good.
>> If I need higher qualities I use a printshop.
>> As I understood the OP is a home user and in that sence 600dpi is ok.
>> As for the heads: you have a point there.
>> I could live with that and would buy a one-head-cartridge though;-)
>>
>> And, most importantly (to me), NO cups ;-)
>>
>
> Yeah, they are uncomfortable things to wear, aren't they? ;-)
>
> A long time ago I posted instructions to the list on how to replace
> cups with lpr, given -any- printer, -any- driver.  What I have observed
> is the prevelance of the use of cups in the online guides for hooking
> up printers is because most people writing most of those guides out
> there really don't understand how all the programs interrelate with
> each other, and are merely copying other people's guides in how
> to set the things up.
>
> Just about all the online printer setup guides that use cups in the
> examples are tracable back to the instructions for setting up a printer
> in gnome, on a Linux box where the distribution had gnome
> preinstalled, since cups is also preinstalled.
>
> All cups does is muck with config files, it does not actually do
> any conversion.  The engines that do the heavy lifting are
> ghostscript, which either converts postscript input direct to
> printerspeak, for the limited number of drivers compiled into
> it, or converts it to an intermediate format that is massaged
> by gimpprint, or the manufacturers driver (ie: hp's driver for
> example) into the printerspeak needed by the particular printer
> model.  You do not need cups, or apsfilter for that matter, to
> plug the engines into each other.
>
> The other thing that is often missed is that for printers like the
> Epson stylus c84 that I have, or the officejet that the OP has,
> to get from postscript into the gross muck that these winprinters
> can understand, takes a huge amount of CPU cycles for anything
> complex.  Pentium systems under 1Ghz need not apply.
>
> Ted

Could you either repost your lpr email or if you remember the subject? I have 
access to questions back toOct 1999 with 2.115 posts from you :) We have 
FreeBSDing on workstations pretty weill in hand (thanks Xorg/KDE) but printing 
remains beyond our grasp.