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Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 13:41:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org>
To: frank@exit.com
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cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: USB versus SMP and Epson printers.
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On  7 Aug, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> Don Lewis wrote:
>> Unless someone snuck it in while I wasn't looking, our ulpt
>> implementation doesn't support reading data from the printer, so it's
>> not possible to check the ink levels.  I've had to boot Linux in order
>> to do this.
> 
> Hmm.  Okay...  Unfortunately, the straight printing didn't work, either.  I
> tried the "check the ink levels" trick only after my test page never printed.
> I'm using CUPS, could this be a limitation of the ulpt driver?  Should I be
> using another device?

I use a laser printer for most of my printing, so I only use my Epson
Photo 890 when I need to print color.  I never bothered to set up print
spooling for it, and just point ghostscript at it.  One problem I ran
into is that anything I attempt to print after a power-on gets turned
into garbage that prints a few funky-looking characters at the top the
page and then ejects the page unless I first run "escputil -n -u -r
/dev/ulpt0", which seems to send a magic escape sequence to the printer
that puts it in the proper mode.  I haven't had a time to investigate
further.