Linux Printing: Still Awful

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 09:17:30AM -0400, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> It's a monochrome laser model, the ML-2250. I have gotten it to print a 
> couple of test pages correctly but then it goes off into the weeds again,
> dumping out pages of gibberish. Perhaps the ghostscript interpreter is
> somehow getting removed and the thing is getting raw postscript commands
> to print.
> 
> One option I suppose is to put the Samsung postscript interpreter chip in
> the machine, turning it into a postscript printer. But that option not
> cheap and it eliminates the flexibility one gets with software-based
> ghostscript.

A real postscript printer has always seemed like the best bet.
Ghostscript has had many bugs, and until recently their track record of
actually fixing bugs has been subpar in many cases (It took me 18 months
of nagging to get a bug fix into ghostscript, after one of the
developers had given me the patch to fix it.  He forgot to check it in.)

Of course postscript requires a print engine, which many cheap printers
don't even have (they don't actually support any print languages,
nevermind postscript).  You can buy nice colour laser printers with
postscript for about $500 though, so really if you consider time and
hassle worth anything, then those $200 laser printers are really not
worth it in the long run (the $500 printer uses cheaper toner too).

> I'm going to have another round with it today and if there is no progress
> I may have to hire someone who knows their way around this stuff...

I decided a long time ago that it was never worth buying cheap hardware.
I also learned it isn't worth buying stuff you aren't sure will work
perfectly.

--
Len Sorensen
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