Raziel wrote:chris wrote:@Raziel
The main problem with HP printers is that our usbprinter.device doesn't have Dot4 support.
Most HP printers support PCL5 or PostScript, both of which are supported by our existing drivers.
There is a dot4 usb printer driver on the depot, iirc, couldn't that be incorporated into the available usb printer driver.
That Dot4 driver was never completed and I've had very limited success with it.
And actually i don't have the (USB) problem rigtht now as i'm using my printer through the net, like nbache, using lpr or rather netprinter.device.
So am I, using ipp.device and the PostScript driver. This mostly stems from the fact I could never get the printer to work over USB due to the Dot4 issue, but as it is set up now, I'm liable to leave it like that as it's on a dedicated print server.
I don't quite understand when it comes to PS/PCL printer drivers...if PS is supported then "thats it"? There is nothing more a PS driver could be teached to do, like duplex print (on/off)
I would have thought so, otherwise there wouldn't be printer-specific PS drivers on other platforms.
, maybe even copy/scan from a MuFu?
That's not a job for the printer driver - that would be a scanner driver.
OK, can existing DOT4 and PCL3 printer be improved anyhow? Do we know which exact models it fully supports?
Is there a list which models these two drivers fully support? Priniting is somewhat more essential then scanning
Can at least driver for one model of HP printer (e.g. cheap 1010 or similar) be done?
The Dot4 driver supports all printers that use the Dot4 protocol - well, in theory it does, but I've never got it to work. Most USB HP printers only support Dot4, I'm not sure about other makes.
The HP Photosmart driver is a PCL3GUI driver. Any printer supporting that language should work with it.
The HP LaserJet 1010 (I'm assuming you mean the old one, it confuses me as HP sometimes recycle their model numbers and I have a feeling there's a "new" 1010 too) is a PCL5 printer. Well, actually, it's not. The LJ1015 is a PCL5 printer. The LJ1010 (and LJ1012) only support a subset of the PCL5 language. The old LJ4 driver (the LJ4 is a PCL5 printer) in WB works perfectly with the LJ1015 (I was using it over the parallel interface for a number of years), although I couldn't say for sure whether it would be suitable for the 1010 or 1012.
The actual printer drivers aren't much of an issue (and a port of Gutenprint is coming along nicely which should help there anyway). The main problem is the lack of Dot4 support, which renders a printer completely unuseable as OS4 cannot communicate with it. (sure, you can say "avoid Dot4 printers", but there's no way of knowing if you have a Dot4 printer until you plug it in, and then it's too late)
