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Date:      Fri, 7 Jul 2006 01:27:36 -0700
From:      "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>
To:        "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>, "dick hoogendijk" <dick@nagual.st>
Subject:   Re: HP Officejet Printer
Message-ID:  <002d01c6a19f$35bd7ac0$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645>
References:  <20060705073724.GC29631@lothlorien.nagual.st><004301c6a0bd$0d36dc00$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645> <20060706155340.GA7731@lothlorien.nagual.st>

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "dick hoogendijk" <dick@nagual.st>
To: "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions@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@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



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