KenK said:
Perhaps I'm being too critical but I'm just full up to here with printer
problems. Before now I've never had any, and that's been some 40 years -
since the MITS Altair and Radio Shack TRS-80!.
Hi there, oldtimer
That is more experience than I have, so I can't
argue with your perspective!
Wasn't aware of that. Does this work under Win XP Home too?
Sadly, not easily. So this is just background info for you: The
standard printing system on linux and MacOSX is called CUPS, and is
developed (after being bought) by Apple. There are some ports to
Windows, but not recent or updated regularly.
The open source inkjet drivers for Epson and Canon are contained in a
project known as gutenprint. I am currently maintaining and developing
the Canon part of this. Effectively, without any input from Canon, I
work by parsing printjobs captured under Windows XP, using all
possible combinations of print media, quality setting, color/mono,
duplex, media tray and borderless. As needed, new functionality is
incorporated, and as time permits, lacking functionality added and
thereby automatically backported to all existing supported printers.
So if you have an old printer that is no longer supported under
Windows 7, for example, it will forever be supported in open source.
A strength of CUPS is that is manages printers over a network, and has
great administration facilities. So it is not necessary to have a
driver for a printer on the machine you are printing from, only the
machine where the printer is attached.
A downside of CUPS is that it is not interactive: that is, options are
not interactive like in Windows---all options are always available,
and the driver has to do the work of prioritizing and selecting which
combinations are legitimate or not, if the user made incompatible
(from the printer firmware perspective) selections. This is usually
not a problem, but can be, in such complex devices as, for example,
ALPS printers with multiple operating modes.
In such situtations, multiple PPDs, one for each distinct operating
mode, are the best idea, and a new printer is set up for each mode
(the same could be done if you have some fixed requirements, such as
monochrome printing 2-pages per sheet in draft mode; compared to color
printing at standard quality 1-page per sheet).
Enough of that
First problem was it would only feed paper if there were only a few sheets
- 5 or 10 or so - in the blank paper tray. Just yesterday I discovered and
tried the 'clean rollers' in the Maintenance menu. Today I can print with a
stack of paper in the tray. Hope it works through the whole stack and
continues in the future.
OK, that is probably mechanical-related, not much the driver can do
about that I surmise.
Second problem is that it sometimes doesn't print when I send it something.
Seems to be mostly a problem with my ancient Xnews newsreader which doesn't
use the usual dialog box to print - just does it. The Canon is selected in
Control Panel as default printer. Haven't quite sorted out everything -
seems to be a problem when used first after switching printers but not
sure. The problem is erratic and I need to have much more experience with
it. This morning tried printing from Xnews first thing with no problems!
<shrug> I've not used the Canon that much.
Windows spooling has problems sometimes. Could also be memory issues
on the spool or in the application creating the printjob. It isn't
really fair to blame the printer for this, but you could blame the
driver if it doesn't send the job properly (if indeed that is the
cause of the problem.
All in all, not that bad, but annoying after decades of no printer
problems.
Understandable.
Thanks very much for you kind offer of help.
No worries! If you ever decide to use MacOSX or linux, you can rest
assured there is plenty of printer support!
