I have an ultra-cheap HP Color Laserjet 1600 printer, the kind that costs less than a full set of replacement toner cartridges, and the ones that are shipped in the box are only 20% full. From the driver publisher info it appears the I/O protocol logic of the printer was provided by a company called Zenographics, which appears to now be either a part of or owned by Marvell. It works well enough when you have it directly connected to a machine via the USB cable, but sharing it is a nightmare.
In particular, the drivers are very unstable when targeting shared printers. Especially problematic is printing from Vista to XP, or XP to XP, or XP to Vista. With some combinations, the print spooler crashes; with others, it simply hangs, and the spooler service needs to be restarted to get the document printing at all. The folks on the HP forums seem to imply (a) that this is by design, and (b) sharing the printer effectively is impossible. I find this hard to swallow; since the printer works when directly connected, there is no valid reason why printing across the network should not also work, since the physical printer doesn't come into the equation. Bits are bits; if the driver can't consistently send some bits across the network, either there's some atrocious QA going on inside Zenographics, or worse, malice.
I had despaired of ever getting it working nicely as a small workgroup printer, but I saw a faint glimmer of hope when setting up my home NAS, based on Solaris. CUPS is available for Solaris, and there's a Foomatic printer driver available for this specific model as well.
It turns out that I couldn't get CUPS configured with this printer and driver setup. CUPS uses a web page interface for configuration, but it was desperately slow, and every time I tried to print a test page, it informed me that the printer had just gone offline. I could see all the background processes it had started up to print, and the printer device at /dev/printers/0 was indeed opened for writing, but it never got anywhere.
But that didn't matter. The foo2hp driver provided the only real tools I needed: a PostScript to ZjStream (the printer protocol) filter, which simply reads the raw PostScript and outputs the raw print data. Windows ships with a generic PostScript driver; I use the PScript5-based "HP Color Laserjet PS". A simple shell pipeline from source to printer device would do.
To share the printer, I needed some kind of queue for buffering. I decided on a simple filesystem-based approach, which seems to me to be in the Unix tradition. I created a share on my Solaris box specifically for files to be printed. Windows clients can use the aforementioned generic printer driver with a FILE: target, and place the output in this shared directory. The spooler script I wrote polls this directory periodically, and attempts to print whatever it finds.
The printing logic is pretty simple, at its core:
foo2hp2600-wrapper -p 9 input.ps > /dev/printers/0
The actual code is a mite more sophisticated, of course; it does logging, moves documents to be printed into a directory categorized by date and time, etc. And in future it can be extended to other document types than PS, e.g. printing PDFs or photos simply by copying them to a directory.
Another advantage of this approach is that I can shell out to ps2pdf to create an archival version of the printed document. The PDF is usually far smaller than the PS and is viewable from Windows without installing a PostScript viewer. This archival version is useful if I ever need to print it again. Consider online flight checkins, for example - some websites (such as EasyJet) prevent printing the boarding pass more than three times, which is a little inconvenient if you're having printer trouble.
On the downside, printer options that can't be expressed directly in the PostScript with the generic driver can't be configured. For example, the way I have things configured I'm limited to printing monochrome on A4 by default. In practice this isn't really a problem, since the vast majority of print jobs fit this template; I could create other spooler directories for different defaults.
I expect that with enough research, I'll be able to get CUPS configured correctly, or to get Samba to look like a PostScript printer that dumps the raw network data into my spooler directory. However, I'm pretty happy with my hack for now...
2 comments:
Roberto Azzimonti wrote (to my email address):
thanks for this interesting blog, we also found some of our clients had to
update or downgrade the printer driver in order to work properly (especially
HP laser printers).
I can't post a comment to your blog as the word verification does not
display.
Anyway I was wondering although it's an interesting article normally in the
real word I buy reliable printers in the first place just to avoid these
kind of problems.
You saved some money upfront but how much time did you then put into this
printer to make it work the way you wanted?
Well, Roberto, one day several years ago I needed to print some documents and I didn't have a printer. I was going to get a cheap black and white laser, but when I got to the shop, there was this printer. It had been opened by a previous customer, which knocked down the price even further.
All I needed to do was print some black and white documents. This printer could and did perform well at this task. It was only when I had to share the thing that the problems started.
As for how long I spent on it: it took me maybe 50 minutes last night playing around with CUPS before I gave up on it, but apart from that, the foo2hp driver compiled and worked pretty much from the get go (maybe 15 minutes), and I wrote my print spooler script in about 20 minutes before grabbing lunch.
I probably spent more time writing the blog post than I did on work that actually got the printer going! In any case, it was interesting, and I'm happy that I got things working. Overcoming obstacles can sometimes be more rewarding than plain sailing...
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