Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:03:06 +0100 From: "Kjell B." <homebell@telia.com> To: Brian John <brianjohn@fusemail.com> Cc: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: trouble printing Message-ID: <4211201A.5030507@telia.com> In-Reply-To: <420FCEA2.5020307@fusemail.com> References: <420FCEA2.5020307@fusemail.com>
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On 2005-02-13 23:03, Brian John wrote: > Hello, I am having trouble printing from my HP Deskjet 710C printer. It > is hooked up via parallel port and I can print fine with it from > Windows. However, I can't get it to work in FreeBSD. I followed the > instructions here: > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/printing-intro-setup.html > > Everything seems to be fine. But when I try to test the printer using a > command similar to this: > > # cat file > /dev/lptN > > or this: > > lptest > /dev/lpt0 > > nothing happens. Does anyone have a clue what I might have done wrong? > > Thanks for the help > > /Brian > > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-newbies > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-newbies-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > I understand the Deskjet 710C is a similar beast as the 720C which I have, i.e. it is a PPA printer. PPA is a proprietary HP format for which there is no native support in either Linux or FreeBSD, but only in Windows (and possibly Mac). Have a look at http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-DeskJet_710C for some hints. There is more information elsewhere, but I don't have the links handy. In summary, you have to first produce PostScript output, convert it to PPM with Ghostscript, and finally convert that to PPA before sending it off to the HW. Personally, I set the printer up like this in printcap: dj720c|lp|HP DeskJet 720C:sd=/var/spool/lpd/dj720c:sh:if=/usr/local/bin/ppa-test -filter:lp=/dev/lpt0: where ppa-test-filter (my naming, was supposed to be temporary) contains #!/bin/sh #cat $1 | \ /usr/local/bin/gs -sDEVICE=ppmraw -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -r600 -sst dout=%stderr -sOutputFile=- - | \ /usr/local/bin/pnm2ppa -i - -o - (third line broken). You need to install the ports print/ghostscript (7.07 is the version I'm running) and print/pnm2ppa (I run version 1.12). Both are called from the ppa-test-filter script. Then you can feed PostScript output to the printer (dj720c or lp in my case). Don't forget to read the pnm2ppa documentation for calibration and fine-tuning. It took me quite an amount of hours to get it going. I hope I saved you some of those hours with the above. -- Kjell
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