stutopia.com » printers http://stutopia.com www.elcome to my world. Sat, 02 Apr 2011 06:46:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 No country for old printers http://stutopia.com/2007/02/22/old-printers-need-extra-love/ http://stutopia.com/2007/02/22/old-printers-need-extra-love/#comments Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:24:59 +0000 sho http://www.stutopia.com/?p=4 Holy crap. It almost took me two whole days to setup my Mac to print to my HP Deskjet 722c. Apparently, this bad boy’s driver uses Printer Performance Architecture (PPA) protocol, which means it’s a WinPrinter. Thus your postscript data needs to be converted first, to PPA instructions either on the host or client side. Not caring about how this forces some additional processing time over utilizing a perfectly good old printer, I set about this journey and learned two things:
1. There’s already a project out there that exists to bridge the gap of supported OS drivers for HP’s PPA printers called pnm2ppa.
2. Someone packaged it up for Mac OSX in a .dmg format. I grabbed it from here, but you also need ghostscript installed before you install the pnm2ppa package.

Hope that helps anybody who finds themselves in a similar situation.

And for bonus points, I got this old printer working on TrendNet’s Multi-Port Print Server (TE100-P21 v2) via its parallel port. So far, it’s working like a champ. I’m accessing it from my Mac via lpd. The print server has 2 USB ports to use as well, just in case I decide to add a shiny laser printer to my arsenal.

]]> http://stutopia.com/2007/02/22/old-printers-need-extra-love/feed/ 0