Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:17:29 +0100 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Ouyang Xueyu <freebsd@suiyuan.de> Cc: FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: MFC 7840W under CUPS Message-ID: <20120211231729.d4ad2f8d.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <fc3bb6c7b4bf770606b95d2514e8863a@mail.a4a.de> References: <fc3bb6c7b4bf770606b95d2514e8863a@mail.a4a.de>
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On Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:21:59 +0100, Ouyang Xueyu wrote: > Hello, > > I have Freebsd 8.2 and CUPS installed and try to print on my Brother > MFC 7840W printer. The printer is accessible by a static IP address, is > configured in CUPS but everytime I only get blank pages when I'm trying > to print. > > Does anybody know a solution for this behaviour? The technical specification of the printer at http://www.brother-usa.com/mfc/modeldetail.aspx?PRODUCTID=MFC7840W#.TzbkwOsS-Jo indicates that it does understand PCL. Just for testing, you could try to _not_ use CUPS and send PCL to the printer directly, either by the system's spooling mechanism (which seems to be considered "depricated" now as the big desktop environments and some "stand-alonge" applications consider CUPS the only printing interface, which they seem to hardcode into the programs) or by the direct way, using its network connection (which is a good thing, better than USB in my opinion). Really - if the specifications say the printer can do PCL and has some kind of PS, why should it be complicated to get that "excellent" capabilities working with CUPS? Here is a simple test that you can use: First print something from an application (web browser, text processing program, image manipulator etc.), but send the output to a file. Most print dialogs offer a "print to file" choice. Save the result to /tmp/print.ps - I'll use this name for demonstration, you can use any other name. Then verify what you've printed to be a PostScript file. % file /tmp/print.ps /tmp/print.ps: PostScript document text conforming DSC level 3. You can verify the content to be printed using any PS viewer, e. g. gv or gs, or whatever comes with your desktop environment. If it is a valid PS file, you can do two things: a) Test if the printer's BR-Script3 is PS-compatible: % nc 192.168.123.456 9100 < /tmp/print.ps Let's assume that 192.168.123.456 is the IP of the printer. :-) Let's also assume that port 9100 is the port where the printer accepts jobs. Some printers use different ports for their different "personalities". See the documentation which port to use. If unsure, leave it blank. b) Test if the printer does understand PCL. Same assumptions apply. % printf "\033&k2G" | nc 192.168.123.456 9100 % gs -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dPARANOIDSAFER -dSAFER \ -sDEVICE=ljet4 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -r600x600 \ -sOutputFile=- /tmp/print.ps | nc 192.168.123.456 9100 You can see that this test specifies a "ljet4" printer driver. This refers to the HP Laserjet 4 and 4000 families, but it does produce PCL, so it should be fine. Report back if this works (i. e. _which_ of them, and if not, with which unexpected results). If it does work, my suggestion would be to dump CUPS and use the system's default mechanism with a "man made" printer filter. It's very easy. Easier than dealing with the CUPS "blackbox" in my opinion... -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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