As I discussed earlier, some printers are inherently unsupported
because they don't speak a normal printer language, instead using the
computer's CPU to render a bitmap which is then piped to the printer
at a fixed speed. In a few cases, these printers also speak something
normal like PCL, but often they do not. In some (really low-end)
cases, the printer doesn't even use a normal parallel connection but
relies on the vendor's driver to emulate what should be hardware
behaviour (most importantly flow control).
In any case, there are a few possible workarounds if you find yourself
stuck with such a lemon.
There is now a Windows printer driver available (called mswinpr2) that
will run a print job through Ghostscript before finally printing it.
(Rather like an if filter in Unix's LPD). There is also a new
Ghostscript driver which will print using Windows GDI calls. Taken
all together, this allows a Windows machine to print
PostScript to a Windows-only printer through the vendor's driver.
If you get that working, you can then follow the instructions above
for printing to a Windows printer over the network from Linux to let
Unix (and other Windows, Mac, etc) hosts print to your lemon printer.
Some HP printers use "Printing Performance Architecture"
(marketingspeak for "we were too cheap to implement PCL"). This is
supported in a roundabout way via the pbm2ppa translator written by
Tim Norman. Basically, you use ghostscript to render PostScript into
a bitmapped image in pbm format and then use pbm2ppa to translate this
into a printer-specific ppa format bitmap ready to be dumped to the
printer. This program may also come in ghostscript driver format by
now.
The ppa software can be had from
the ppa home page; pbm2ppa supports some models of the HP 720, 820, and 1000;
read the documentation that comes with the package for more details on
ppa printer support.
Most of the cheap Lexmark inkjets use a proprietary language and are
therefore Winprinters. However, Henryk Paluch has written a program
which can print on a Lexmark 7000. Hopefully he'll be able to figure
out color and expand support to other Lexmark inkjets. See
here for
more info.
Similarly, there are now drivers for the 5700, 1000, 1100, 2070, and
others. See the supported printers listing above, and my web site,
for more information on obtaining these drivers.
