[plug] GDI Printers

[Michael Holland]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Randal Adamson wrote:

> Has anyone managed to successfully get a GDI Printer to work using CUPS
> or SAMBA via a windows share?

Since nobody more knowledgable has replied, I'll try a comment.

IIRC, ms-win requires the printer drivers to be on each client, not the
server. There is no intermediate language.
 Has this changed? Is there any kind of equivalent to postscript that can
be sent from client to print server?

 Since GDI printers basically just get a bitmap from the computer, you'd
think there'd be a standard way to do that, but nope.
If you can get the specs, writing a driver can be trivial. Just adapt a
small ghostscript module to write out the rendered bitmap in the desired
format. IF!

> I have a Panasonic KX-P7100 Laser Printer which only has drivers for
> Windows.

So how might it be possible to use it from Linux? By what interface?

Perhaps what you need is a Win32 app that emulates a postscript printer??
Though thats a question for a different forum.

> I've tried a stack of things including modifying what port it prints to
> so it goes to ghostscript etc.

!? Tried sacrificing a chicken?

> No luck so far. Any tips would be appreciated.

Dont rely on luck.