[Printing-user-general] rpd is not ppd?.?.?

hi all

i am trying to get a roland sx-15 plotter to work in linux.  i've worked out 
that the file format is pcl or hpgl.  the windows driver comes with an 
appropriate rpd file which looks suspiciously like a ppd. see attachment.  
does anyone know how to convert this to ppd and is there any chance that it 
will work with cups through lp0

regards carlos

*RPD-Roland: "1.0"
*FormatVersion: "1.0"
*FileVersion: "1.0"
*LanguageVersion: Japanese
*PCFileName: "sx15.rpd"
*Product: "(SX-15)"
*ModelName: "SX-15"
*NickName: "SX-15"
*ShortNickName: "SX-15"
*ModelType: "STIKA"
*PenForceEnable: False
*8MacToolsEnable: False
*ToolInfo: 0 0 0 12 100 80 0 350 250
*ToolChangeEnable: False
*SwitchWidth: 2500 3400
*PermanentForm: "1"

*% ==== Device Capabilities ===============
*ColorDevice: True

[Printing-user-general] What mini-distributions are good for print server?

My office so far collected the following printers:
> an HP Laserjet 4050 - Jetdirect J6149A card installed
> an HP Laserjet 4200 - Jetdirect 615n card installed
> an HP Laserjet 5P - parallel port only
> an HP Officejet 500 - parallel port only
> a Panasonic KX-P1180 24-pin dot matrix - parallel port only

Each of the printers has its own particular function, and we would like to keep
them all available.  At this point we want to dedicate one PC as a central
print server so that all of our network users can print to any one of these
printers.  Our experience with Linux is limited.  We have read about Freesco,
but we haven't tried it yet -- might there also be any alternative Linux
mini-distributions that are especially designed for easy setup as a multi-port
print server?  URLs to relevent resources are welcome!

[Printing-user-general] Successful uniprint driver for Sipix A6 Photoprinter

Hi everybody,

After playing around on and off for the last month, I am now successfully 
printing on my Sipix A6 pocket printer.  It is a serial printer meant for 
laptops and PDAs and is dirt cheap on ebay these days because of poor driver 
support on newer versions of Windows, palm and Wince.  

I was able to hack together a uniprint driver after I found that it uses a 
subset of the escp command language.  

First step is to set the proper serial port parameters:

# stty -F /dev/ttyS1 115200 crtscts cs8 -cstopb -parenb

Your serial port may be ttyS0

First I have to resize the postscript document down to A6.

# psresize -w10.5cm -h 14.8cm -Pletter old.ps new.ps

Then I send it through ghostscript:

gs  <at> sipixa6.upp -sPAPERSIZE=a6 -sOutputFile=new.bin new.ps -c quit

Then I send the binary file to the printer:

# cat new.bin > /dev/ttyS1

gs doesn't always put a final cr/lf pair at the end of the binary file, so I 
made a 2 byte file with a cr/lf pair.  So instead I could do:

[Printing-user-general] Kyocera FS-1030D Can print test and pdf, but no Postscript

Hello.

I also posted this in Kyocera printing, but since it might be a problem
unrelated to Kyocera printers, I post it here again.

This is probably a newbie-question, but help is greatly appreciated.

On a Debian Sarge Installation (dual Boot with XP), CUPS and lpr(1) are
availible. The demons are listed as this by ps
/usr/sbin/cupsd -F
/usr/sbin/lpd -s

Using kprinter on KDE, I configured CUPS (v 1.1.23-10)and made the
Kyocera FS-1030D Ecosys printer known.
This is the only printer on a desktop PC and connected to
/dev/usb/lp0
It is recognized nicely by hotplug during boot or when switching on the printer
later.
I was able to print the testpage using kprinter.
I am also able to print .pdf, either using kprinter or
> lpr foo.pdf
However, when trying to print something like foo.ps using kprinter or lpr,
this happend:
CUPS seemed to work fine, send something to the printer and showed the job in
the job done section of http://localhost:631/admin
The printer lighted its Online-LED, (woke up from sleep mode if necessary) and
lighted its Data-LED. So he was indeed reciving data. Then it made some noise
as if it were to print now, but then went bach to do nothing.

I could get around this problem.

Re: [Printing-user-general] Why has nothing changed?

Perhaps Okidata does not see Linux as a platform worthy of support.

Glendon Gross wrote:
> Well,   I recently bought a Okidata C3200 color laser.  Windows printing
> is excellent, and the vendor supplied driver
> works well under OS X.   After repeated failures to print to it from
> Suse Linux 8.2, even after installing the latest CUPS, I  finally called
> Okidata for support.  The support technician from Okidata explained that
> their engineers were able to write a driver
> for OS X, but don't have plans to release a Linux driver.  So the end
> result is that for this particular non-postscript printer,
> Linux support is non existent.   Consequently I have to praise Apple for
> supplying Okidata with the hooks that they needed
> to write a working driver for OS X.   The driver uses Gimp-print, and I
> was unable to port it to linux.

Did the technician from Okidata say that their engineers tried to write a
driver for Linux, but failed, or that they will not even try? 

[Printing-user-general] Foomatic-filters-ppds overwrites foomatic-filters!!!

Hi all

I tried to upgrade foomatic-db, foomatic-db-hpijs,
foomatic-filters, foomatic-engine and
foomatic-filters-ppds on Tomahawk Desktop (
http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/ ).

I managed to upgrade foomatic-db, foomatic-db-hpijs,
foomatic-filters and foomatic-engine without an issue
to the latest.

But when I try to install the latest
foomatic-filters-ppds, the Tomahawk Desktop complains
that /usr/bin/foomatic-rip and
/usr/bin/foomatic-gswrapper are already installed by
the foomatic-filters package
(foomatic-filters-3.0-current.tar.gz).

Thanks to the package user based package management
system used in Tomahawk Desktop, I came to know this.
In Tomahawk Desktop, people don't use root to install
packages. If I had used root to install, I would have
overwritten foomatic-rip, foomatic-gswrapper and their
man pages with a wrong copy without even aware of
it!!!

Following diff shows that what is already installed is
correct and should not be overwritten. 

diff foomatic-gswrapper /usr/bin/foomatic-gswrapper

Re: [Printing-user-general] Why has nothing changed?

 Hi,

 I think you're right, but I don't agree with some
things. 
 Software quality also means usability, any soft.
enginnering book you tell that! FOSS in general does
not have quality, if you see for this point. Being
stable and secure are also things that make software
have quality, but not just that. Technology is here to
help us do our tasks better and faster. If I need 1
week to make my printer work on Linux, of course
writing it with my own hands or paying someone to
install it will make me complete it faster (or "less
slowly"). On Windows people usually plug and use (and
I'm aware that Windows has more drivers, and that
hardware companies support Windows better, that's not
FOSS fault completely).
 But in the last 5 years things changed a lot. Today
it may be easier to install some Linux distros than it
is to install Windows itself. FOSS audience has
changed too. Developers and project leaders see that,
most of the times, and change or add new goals to
their projects. A lot has to be done, but I see
clearly it is changing. Some of my friends at college
run away from Linux, and they also study CS, they
should not, they should be the people to improve foss
quality.. but kinda shows how many aspects got to be
improved. Last year I was teaching Linux to some of
them, and when I answered a guy on how to add his

[Printing-user-general] Creating uniprint driver for Sipix A6 Pocket Printer

Hi there,

I'm trying to get my A6 Pocket Printer working with linux, and 
it is a fair bit of fun.  I found some specs over at sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=24909&group_id=119761

That show it as using a stripped down esc/p language.  I've 
got it to the point where it will print, but the output looks absolutely
terrible.  It looks like it was rendering using about 20 dpi resolution, 
instead of the 400 dpi resolution of the printer.  It reminds me of the 
early dot matrix printers for the C64.  There are giant dots, and vertical
stripes.  I can printer nicely 
from Windows but who wants to do that.

I actually went through the trouble of converting a small output file to 
binary and looking at all the 1's and zero's to see if things were making.

It seems that the printer is printing what it is being sent, but the 
uniprint driver with my custom upp file is creating garbage.

Does anybody know how I can improve my output?

Mark

Here is my upp

-supModel="SiPix A6 Pocket Printer"
-sDEVICE=uniprint
-dNOPAUSE