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Advanced Printer Support: 800x600 dpi + 11x17" Paper

From Karl Raffelsieper on Thu, 26 Nov 1998

>I am running Caldera 1.3 on my small networked P75 with 40MB Ram and
>Several SCSI drives and Scanner, attached to the Parallel port is my
>Xerox 4520 PostScript printer. I wish to have the P75 act as a print
>server to the other PCs (running S.u.S.E. 5.1) This all works find, Here's
>the problem.

Is this a real PostScript printer, with a PostScript interpreter and a full CPU built into it?

Is your print server passing the raw print jobs to the printer or is it passing them through it's own 'gs' (ghostscript), aps, nenscript, or other filters?

Yes this is a genuine Adobe Level 2 PostScript 20 Megs of RAM built in -- RISC processor, 24 page/min screamer of a network printer, (less the network card) and you can drop the raw PS data to it without ghostscript or other filters. (This is Xerox's answer to the HP 5si)

This is were I am having my trouble. The driver installed is a generic Post Script driver, and it does not seem to make all the printer capabilities available. Even locally on the server. How can I make configuration modifications to all workstations so when Star Office 5.0 (as an example) is aware of the printers paper sizes. My limited understanding of the Post Script language is all the page definition, font info, formatting, etc. is actually written into the document. Thus so long as the data is sent raw to the server and it will send it raw to the PS printer the Adobe chips in the printer will do the rest. But I suspect I must report the printer capabilities to the OS some place. I started at /etc/printcap but it didn't seem obvious to me where to make the changes.

What applications are you running? (In other words, what applications are generating the PostScript).

If they only use a subset of the PostScript supported by your printer then they have to be updated to generate more advanced PostScript. If you are dropping/sending raw PostScript to your printer then Linux isn't involved at all. It's between your applications and your printer.

If you have Something like apsfilter (ASCII/text to PostScript) or nenscript (New "enscripting") listed in your /etc/printcap entry to transform text into PostScript that that's where you'd need to make the changes (though that should affect pages produced through Applixware, StarOffice, xfig, TeX/LaTeX/LyX etc since those are producing their own PostScript or their own .dvi or raw printer files).

In the cases where TeX/LaTeX and/or LyX are involved the applications generate a .dvi file. This can be converted to PostScript using the 'dvips' command, or they can be used directly by any of the printer specific dvi drivers (called "dviware" by TeXnophiles).

That's why I suggested calling Xerox to ask if they have or know of dviware for your printer.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 36 January 1999

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