Printer advice

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 13 May 2017 23:49:07 +0000, Manish Jain wrote:
> Any recent HP printer should work well under FreeBSD. The printer
> can be made to work with CUPS,  and/or local printing and scanning
> with hplip / sane-backends. To install everything in one go : pkg
> install cups hplip sane-backends

In case the printer understands PS, you usually don't need the
device-specific drivers or filters. You don't even need CUPS. :-)

But if you use CUPS, HP printers are quite well supported. Check
at http://hplipopensource.com/ and verify the _exact_ model.
It doesn't hurt if there is a PPD available.



> Some printers which do not work with CUPS can be made to work
> by deleting the CUPS queue and directly running the printer
> under hplip. To setup hplip, use 'hp-setup'.

In worst case, you can use a filter like e. g. foo2zjs and
pipe its output directly into the printer device. You can
automate this using the system's printing facility (lpr
and printcap). But as I said, with HP printers this usually
is not needed.



> 2) 'scanimage -L' should list your scanner nicely, at least as root.

HP printers' scanners are often well supported. You need to
install and configure SANE, and then you can access the
scanner via xscanimage, xsane, Gimp, LibreOffice, ...



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...