Check out Ghostscript/Ghostview - this will allow you to print almost any format to almost any printer. It will display these formats to screen as well. Most things the evile (sic) empire charge for have been free from GNU for twenty years or so! Tom --- alug-admin@stu.uea.ac.uk wrote: >
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Printers (fozzy@pelvoux.demon.co.uk)
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Message: 1 Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 00:27:13 +0000 To: David Freeman david_freeman@rocketmail.com Subject: Re: [Alug] Printers
On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 12:21:35PM -0800, David Freeman wrote:
All,
I've decided I need to buy a printer.
After some thought I have decided on the following
criteria
- Must run well with Linux
- Lazer printer
- low cost to buy
- Low running costs (<5p a page)
- Reliable
Can any one suggest a good buy?
The moon on a stick?
Seriously, you may not be able to find something which meets all of the requirements above. Looking at the requirements in more detail:
- Must run well with Linux
Most unix (including Linux) programs are designed to work with a Postscript printer. So, for a printer to work well with Linux it must either have a built-in postscript interpreter or it must have a good ghostscript driver so that ghostscript can be used to convert postscript into whatever strange format the printer uses.
I went for the built-in postscript interpreter.
- Lazer printer
I would expect one of these to be much faster and have a lower cost per page than an inkjet, but for an item of similar quality it will be more expensive to buy.
- low cost to buy
A lot depends on what you regard as low cost. Laser printers have got a lot cheaper in recent years but they will still be more expensive than most injkets. You should be able to get a small "personal" laser printer for between about £200 and £500.
- Low running costs (<5p a page)
The printer I have now is an HP Laserjet 2100/M and the toner cartridge costs about £70 with the average life according to HP being 5,000 sheets, i.e. about 2 boxes of paper - my last one lasted slighly longer than this.
I don't remember how much the paper is but I think about £15 per box (1 box = 5 reams = 2,500 sheets) is probably reasonable.
So, adding it up you get 1.4 p/page for toner and 0.6p/page for paper making a total cost of 2p/page.
Compare this with my previous printer which was an Epson Styluscolor - ink cartridges are about £15 and last about 500 pages. Paper is slighly cheaper, say £2.50 per ream so we get 3p/page for ink and 0.5p/page for paper giving a total or 3.5/page.
- Reliable
It's a bit difficult to measure this one. The printer I've got has been reliable so far in that it has never gone wrong and it only jams if I give it paper which is bent or curled.
Can any one suggest a good buy?
I don't think I can recommend any especially good buy.
The printer I have now which is an HP Laserjet 2100/M I am very pleased with. It is fast, the output quality is good, it hasn't barfed on anything I've sent it, is cheap to run and so far seems reliable.
As I said earlier this is the model with built-in postscript (that's indirectly what the /M stands for - /M actually means "for Macintosh" as far as I know but as Macs have a history of expecting postscript printers it indirectly means built-in postscript).
I bought it from PC World at a discount because it was an ex-demo model (unused I am told). I paid £499 for it, their list price was about £700 if I remember correctly.
I have just tested the ljet4 ghostscript driver driving my printer in PCL mode and that seems to produce output that looks almost indistinguishable from the built-in postscript (for the Times Roman font anyway) so this may indicate that a cheaper HP (PCL only, like the 1100 series) would work well too though I can't say for sure.
One thing to do may be to knock up a postscipt test file, one page preferably, which includes samples of all 30-something fonts as well as various shade and screen effects and see if you can get people to print it for comparison.
Hope this helps, Steve.
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