On 22-Mar-2012 Chris Green wrote:
Does anyone else suffer from this dilemma? Whenever I install my HP Laserjet 1320 printer I wonder which of about a dozen or so alternatives that CUPS offers to use.
For HP 1320 I see:- HP Laserjet 1320 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.7 Simplified (en) HP Laserjet 1320 Foomatic/Postscript (en) HP Laserjet 1320 Foomatic/pxlmono (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320 hpijs, 3.11.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 hpijs pcl3, 3.11.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 pcl3, hpcups 3.11.7 (en) HP Laserjet 1320 series Postscript (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320 series Postscript (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320 series Postscript (recommended) (en) HP Laserjet 1320, hpcups 3.11.7 (en)
There's no 'help' to click on to give any guidance, I *guess* I can't use the Postscript ones as my printer doesn't have Postscript (and, yes there really are three apparently identical Postscript entries). But how do I decide between that odd mix of pcl3, hpijs and hpcups?
-- Chris Green
Chris, are you absultely sure that *your* HP LJ 1320 does not have PostScript? My 1300 certainly does, and I see from the User Manual (on-line on the HP website) that the 1320 also has PostScript (well, PS emulation, like my 1300; but it works fine when I just squirt a raw Postscript file at it). See:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/ CoreRedirect.jsp?redirectReason=DocIndexPDF&prodSeriesId=410622& targetPage=http%3A%2F%2Fbizsupport2.austin.hp.com%2Fbc%2Fdocs %2Fsupport%2FSupportManual%2Fc00208215%2Fc00208215.pdf
[Also = http://tinyurl.com/7rjuy8e ]
When that PDF file comes up, click on: "Printer specifications", then on: "Printer capacities and ratings", then at the bottom of that page (page 129) you will read:
PCL PCL 5e, PCL 6 PS PostScript Level 2 emulation
showing the two languages that the Manual says that the printer supports.
One basic test is to switch the printer on, and then squirt a PostScript file, say "myfile.ps", using
cat myfile.ps > /dev/lp0
(or whatever the port is that your printer is connected to).
In my experience, CUPS can be very tricky to get working, especially for "raw" files (i.e. sent to the printer as-is). The old LP system was much more straightforward.
When you are printing "raw", the main advantage of systems like LP or CUPS is that they send files to the printer via a queue directory, so that you can send more files while still waiting for the first file to finish printing, which the above "cat" command would not do -- though you could wrap it in a script which would look at a "queue" dirrectory, say "mylpq", take the least recent file therein and cat it to the printer (and stash it in a backup directory and delete it from the mylpq directory; and if it gets a succesful return from 'cat' then delete the backup).
Hoping this helps, Ted.
------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@wlandres.net Date: 22-Mar-2012 Time: 21:03:51 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------