suggestions for all-in-one

[Daniel Fussell]

On 02/03/2012 05:37 PM, Michael Torrie wrote:
> On 02/03/2012 04:28 PM, Daniel Fussell wrote:
>>       And the Universal Print Drivers are crap; they want to talk
>> directly to the printer.  Maybe the driver output would be better if
>> they were allowed to talk directly to the printer and could switch modes
>> to something better suited, but we force everything through a print
>> server, so that doesn't work.
> Yes I remember now that this led to no end for problems with CUPS when I
> was working at BYU. I had to really dig to find the real drivers (PS or
> PCL).  Even good old standard LaserJets from years past now are only
> officially supported through this new, wonderful, 300 MB universal crap
> driver.
>
> This fact alone may be enough to remind me never to buy HP again.
>
Yeah, Travis went and peeked under the hood of PDFCreator, and saw they 
were wrapping up a PDF/postscript DLL from Adobe.  So he re-wrapped the 
library into a new custom print driver that adds printer selection and 
price estimates after the application spools the job (forcing users to 
really think about where they want this thing to print).  Now we have 
one small, universal driver for all of our postscript-ish capable printers!

He had to hack around a couple things for which windows terminal session 
the custom window came up on across various windows versions, and the 
applications still occasionally create output the HP RIP doesn't like.  
But we don't get those 2000 page binary garbage prints the universal 
drivers were causing anymore.

We don't have problems like this in the Linux shop; but maybe that's 
because the Linux users aren't fond of keeping paper copies just-in-case...

;-Daniel Fussell