Topic: Apsfilter install issues

[Peter]

I just bought a Brother HL 1440 laserprinter and after some searching found the Apsfilter-Howto on this site. One problem I encountered was that to install Ghostscript depended on installing the Ghostscript Fonts. However, the Ghostscript Fonts won't install unless Ghostscript itself was installed. This Catch-22 was avoided by first installing the fonts with a -nodep option passed to rpm.

The second issue is a bit of a show stopper in that Ghostscript versions 6 and higher should have the HL-1250 support under miscellaneous printers, but all the miscellaneous printers support has been stripped out. And one has to compile (stupid! additional printers support should be a plugin-type feature) Ghostscript to add a printer. I did get a full version of Ghostscript 6.51, but this one is full of dependency hell on X-windows libraries.

The last issue, which may or may be dependent on the previous issue, is that I did try using a HP laserjet 4  as a driver. My mac shows the printer under AppleTalk, but any print job sent to the SME server just disappears. I hoped to at least get garbage prints (like before I installed the apsfilter).

Peter

[Robert]

Since I wrote the HOWTO, I'll see if I can help you with your install problems.

1. ghostscript and ghostscript-fonts are indeed interdependent. This is quite common for RPMS. A better way to get around this than installing with --nodeps is to install both RPMS in one go, like so:
# rpm -Uvh ghostscript-xxx ghostscript-fonts-xxx
I'll put this in the HOWTO.

2. The "minimal ghostscript RPM" that is used for the HOWTO does have rather poor printer driver support. This RPM, packaged by Charlie Brady, was not intended for printing applications. It was intended to provide PostScript processing capabilities with a minimum of requirements on other packages. It does support a large variety of printers, but not those that depend on third-party drivers. I agree that it's not the perfect ghostscript RPM for printing applications. I briefly considered doing my own repackaging based on the RedHat 6.51 SRPM, but it's quite difficult to disentangle the driver patches from the patches that make ghostscript depend on CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and X packages. If you need support for a printer that's not supported by the minimal ghostscript RPM, I would suggest that you install the RedHat ghostscript RPM with all the required libraries. (or do a --nodeps install and hope for the best)

3. Were you able to print a test page with this driver? Could you print from the command line? If no, you wouldn't be able to print from your Mac either. See if installing the correct driver fixes things.

[Peter]

Well, I tried local printing and something wasn't right, so I removed the printer from server-manager and restarted the Apsfilter setup, chose printer 159 (HP laserjet 4, 600x600dpi). Then selected test print. The result was the upper-left quandrant of the test print as the printer is defaulting to 300x300 dpi (even with the print resolution set to 300x300 in Apsfilter's setup) while the test print is done at 600x600 dpi.

After adding the printer to server-manager, I found I also had to redo MacOSX's PrintCenter's link to it. So now I can print but printing is still 600x600 dpi on a 300x300 dpi output. It works okay for now if I chose 50% scale output on the Mac side.

I waiting for a memory upgrade for the printer to arrive, before I really mess around on correcting the dpi mismatch.

Peter

[Robert]

If your client is MacOS X, you may actually be able to find a client-side driver for your printer. If Apple or Brother don't supply it, you may be able to find an open-source driver. In that case you could do without an lpd input filter and server-side printer driver. Apsfilter and ghostscript are particularly useful when there is no client-side driver available. If you use a client-side driver, you may need to change the print command in papd.conf on the server from 'lpr -P%printer' to 'lpr -b -P%printer'.

[Peter]

I have been exploring that options also. I installed a combination Cups-Ghostscript  7.05 pkg on the Mac yesterday. Today, somehow I selected a bookmark which showed both my printers on a webpage. I haven't duplicated it again, because I don't remember which browser I was using (I have Safari, Chimera, Opera and IE running simultaneousy).  and finding that one bookmark out of 100 or more in each browser...

I still haven't work out the details yet for using cups. I think I'm still missing a piece of the puzzle. Postscript printing would be preferred in that less data is sent on the network, but I'm not adverse to using local ripping. Whatever gets the job done cleanly and with the most options is preferred. And at this point I can't change dpi, or select manual tray for envelope printing, so local ripping will probably be better in the end.

Thanks for the tip to force raw mode.
Peter