Subject: Re: Help! Deskjet w/o ghostscript?

From: "Tom Watson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 01:04:21 -0800

On Sun, 28 May 2000 03:17:32 -0400 (EDT), [email-masked] wrote:
> I have a Deskjet 812C hooked up to a FreeBSD machine running
> netatalk (this printer has printed from Samba just fine in
> the past). I don't want to use ghostscript to print to it,
> because the quality of images, well, sucks. :-(
> 
> I have installed the USB/AT driver on my iBook, and figured out
> to put "printer\:Deskwriter" in the papd.conf file. At this
> point, the problem is that attempts to print cough up a
> dialog box that says "An error has occurred, ID = -50".
> That's it. No actual helpful data or anything. :-(
> 
> Nothing helpful shows up in syslog, and if I send a file with
> pap, it works. So what does the Deskjet driver want that
> papd doesn't have?
> 

I don't know what the error -50 is, but there is a DA floating around
that has all of these enumerated.  Look on a shareware site (I will
as well!).  To the second question.  The DeskJet-AT driver probably
wants a special 'status' packet, or some response like that.  From
what I understand, papd only REALLY knows postscript printers, and
can respond to requests with the 'ppd' file for a particular
printer.  When it comes to other types of printers (in my case an
Epson, but that's another story!) it really doesn't have much of
a clue.  The problem is to find out what the driver wants.  This is
a bit more difficult than you really want it to be.  The printer
people don't document much in this area.  The easiest way to get
the information is to do a packet trace on a Mac talking to an
AppleTalk type printer and see EXACTLY what it (the printer) desires.
Then you can dive into papd to see how to fix it up.  Unfortunately,
this has only been done (as far as I can tell) for postscript
printers, and I suspect only because it has been documented (see
the chapter "Printer Spooling Architecture" in _Inside AppleTalk_).

The whole thing is a bit of a discovery process for all of us.  Of
course, if any vendors would publish the responses, it might encourage
us peons to write nice software for them (last I heard, brimstone had
a high melting point *SIGH*).  I suspect that we should be thankful
that there are PostScript "Document Conventions".
-- 
Tom Watson         Generic short signature
[email-masked]     (I'm at home now)