Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Color laser printers

[Robert K. <rl...@al...>]

One other note, we've now broken the 3000 printer mark!  Of course, a
lot of those are just naming and other trivial variations, but
everyone else counts things that way, why shouldn't we?

On Thu, 28 Dec 2017 20:36:20 -0200, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> On 12/28/2017 05:20 PM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
>>> It looks like it worked!  Every option was default except for the page
>>> size -- Letter for one, Tabloid for the other.  Using "Generic PCL color
>>> Laser" and the "LF" variant.
>> 
>> Well, that's good news.  What's the quality like?
>> 
>> Till, can you get me a list of PCL color laser printers (either in the
>> current Gutenprint printer list) and their format and if possible
>> whether they use funky A4 margins?  I'd like to get the printer list
>> updated.
>
> Robert, what you did is a PCL 5c driver. So all printers which understand PCL 5c should work with it.

Yep.

> So the first step is to take the foomatic-db package and look for suitable printers there. Suitable according to foomatic-db are all printers which are supported by a PCL 5c driver. PCL 5c drivers are "cljet5" and "hpijs-pcl5c". See the printer listed in the appropriate driver XML files or these drivers mentioned in printer XML files.

Done.  A fair bit of grunt work.

> Many printers print in color via PCL 6/XL. These printers are supported by the "pxlcolor" driver or the "pxlcolor-..." drivers. It is possible that all PCL 6/XL printers support also PCL 5 (c in case of color printers). We need some printer expert to tell us whether this is the case. If so, there are meny more printers which you could add to the list.

Hopefully they do.  PCL XL isn't something I really want to get
involved with, and it doesn't appear to offer a lot of advantages to
purely raster drivers.  It looks like it's basically an open GDI
printer.  Perhaps someone here knows?  There's one worrisome comment:

Xerox-WorkCentre_7345.xml:      "pxlcolor" and HPIJS are the only drivers that currently print in colour.

But there are probably a lot of random comments in the foomatic
database.

> Also the ready-made manuafacturer PPDs which come with foomatic-db can help if they inform somehow which languages the printer supports in addition to PostScript (printers which support color and PCL).

That's going to be a lot more grunt work to look through :-(

> The second step is, as you already told in a later mail, to find all the PCL 5c printers according to the HPLIP package. For this, install HPLIP and have a look into the file
>
> /usr/share/hplip/data/models/models.dat
>
> Search for the model entries with "tech-class=LJColor". The "tech-subclass=..." informs about special things, like 300-dpi-only, A3 format, ...

Thanks.  I did that.  I found a lot more strays from the Foomatic
database, though.

> HPLIP helps to find also the newest models, but only HP, whereas foomatic-db also helps on other brands, but the newest models are only listed from Ricoh and OEM.

Yep.  hpijs, though, lists other manufacturers' printers.

>> This shouldn't be difficult to backport to 5.2, and it's an obvious
>> candidate.
>
> Would be great to have it. Improvement on PCL-5c printer support would be great.

That shouldn't take me too long.  The printers.xml breakup means a bit
more work, but probably not much, since the file format didn't
actually change and hopefully I can just drop the contents of pcl.xml
into printers.xml.  I'd like to get that done during my remaining 4
days of holiday.
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rl...@al...>

***  MIT Engineers   A Proud Tradition   http://mitathletics.com  ***
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