[geeks] Printers, postscript, networking...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 01:17:18PM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
> I am a bit crunched for space though, so I don't think I could fit most
> color laser printers that could do that.  The closest I've seen would be
> an HP Color LaserJet 2600N ($270), but that doesn't have it's own
> rasterizer and this setup doesn't look like it'll currently work on
> anything but linux:
> 
> http://foo2hp.rkkda.com/


CUPS. It will manage your printer and rasterize the files for you. Since your
printer would be an HP printer, it will use produce a bit map that is at the
highest possible resolution your printer can handle. Originaly HP released
an OCO (object code only) driver for Linux, but eventually they released 
it as an open source (but not GPL) program.

It fits into a "hook" in Ghostscript.

The best way to use it, is to use FOOMATIC, which was implemented under
Linux first, but is just a few PERL programs. 

Obviously if you only have one computer, it will have to have CUPS
running on it, but if you have a recent vintage UNIX or Linux system, it
can act as the master system. CUPS will drive a printer with all sorts
of connections, at one time I had a Linux print server upstairs with a
PCL laser and HP inkjet printers on it and downstairs another Linux system
with a postscript laser printer, Epson inkjet and HP plotter.

Just to mix things up my wife has an HP photoquality printer on her windows
system. You could print on any printer from any system, which at the time
included 4 windows machines, two SPARC Solaris (6 and 9) one X86 Solaris, 
Macintoshes  (OS9 and OSX) and a few vagrant laptops.

Things have calmed down now and we use almost exclusivly my wife's new
improved HP, but  the main system remains.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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