[plug] GDI Printers

Randal Adamson ranz at himladeon.com
Thu Apr 29 17:08:41 WST 2004


On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 10:11, Michael Holland wrote:
> 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?

See my original comment regarding ghostscript. If anyone is "actually
interested" I have a fair bit of docs "HOWTO" to try and get GDI
Printers to work with Ghostscript. A quick search on
http://www.linuxprinting.org may also bring these docs up.

> 
>  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!

Exactly!

> 
> > 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?
> 

As I said - CUPS (preferrably). With cups, you can link to it via LDP or
Samba.

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

As suggested, it has passed my mind to install the Windows Network
Printer Driver using Wine. However, I'm kinda against running things
under wine. I've seen too many scary things happen already with users
who've installed IE under wine.

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

Ingham are getting sick of me doing my "midnight spares" run ;P

> 
> > No luck so far. Any tips would be appreciated.
> 
> Dont rely on luck.
> 
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