Greetings all;

I have a B&W Brother HL-2140 printer, that I normally use with a color computer, all setup and working in cups, in addition to several different profiles for an Epson NX515 combo printer that I bought to replace my old Epson C82 when the printhead in it finally expired.

Everytime I run gimp to print something, I am reminded that its printer database is totally independent of the cups database. And for some reason, tossing a gimp loaded .jpg at the NX515 only gets me about 80 pages of blank paper. Or a printer jam, this NX515 is a POS compared to the old C82.

So my question is: Where do I put the BR2140.ppd that cups uses so that the gutenprint plug-in can also find it? The regular print dialog has no knowledge of this printer, and nowhere near enough controls to be usable.

My wife, who needs about 8 pages of a Contata Finale piece printed on regular paper so they'll lay flat on the piano while she plays them, is checking to see if I've got this done yet about every station break on the tv. And my sanity, if I ever had any, is receding. Help!

Thanks.

On Saturday 26 December 2009, Gene Heskett wrote:

Greetings all;

I have a B&W Brother HL-2140 printer, that I normally use with a color computer, all setup and working in cups, in addition to several different profiles for an Epson NX515 combo printer that I bought to replace my old Epson C82 when the printhead in it finally expired.

Everytime I run gimp to print something, I am reminded that its printer database is totally independent of the cups database. And for some reason, tossing a gimp loaded .jpg at the NX515 only gets me about 80 pages of blank paper. Or a printer jam, this NX515 is a POS compared to the old C82.

So my question is: Where do I put the BR2140.ppd that cups uses so that the gutenprint plug-in can also find it? The regular print dialog has no knowledge of this printer, and nowhere near enough controls to be usable.

My wife, who needs about 8 pages of a Contata Finale piece printed on regular paper so they'll lay flat on the piano while she plays them, is checking to see if I've got this done yet about every station break on the tv. And my sanity, if I ever had any, is receding. Help!

Thanks.

PS, & since no one has touched this one with a single character of reply, I found a workaround. goto print, select the Brother from the printer listing (after its setup with the new menu that's in there someplace), then do a print preview which does display it in portrait, click on the full width button on the menubar, then click on the print button on the preview screen. It is then printed portrait, full sized. Any other method prints it landscape, slightly smaller in scale and still with some of the bottom clipped off.

I feel like I'm playing connect the dots here folks. The excedrin headache number is approaching overflow status...

On Sunday 27 December 2009, upscope wrote:

On Sunday 27 December 2009 07:41:29 am Gene Heskett wrote:

On Saturday 26 December 2009, Gene Heskett wrote:

Greetings all;

I have a B&W Brother HL-2140 printer, that I normally use with a color computer, all setup and working in cups, in addition to several different profiles for an Epson NX515 combo printer that I bought to replace my old Epson C82 when the printhead in it finally expired.

Everytime I run gimp to print something, I am reminded that its printer database is totally independent of the cups database. And for some reason, tossing a gimp loaded .jpg at the NX515 only gets me about 80 pages of blank paper. Or a printer jam, this NX515 is a POS compared to the old C82.

So my question is: Where do I put the BR2140.ppd that cups uses so that the gutenprint plug-in can also find it? The regular print dialog has no knowledge of this printer, and nowhere near enough controls to be usable.

My wife, who needs about 8 pages of a Contata Finale piece printed on regular paper so they'll lay flat on the piano while she plays them, is checking to see if I've got this done yet about every station break on the tv. And my sanity, if I ever had any, is receding. Help!

Thanks.

PS, & since no one has touched this one with a single character of reply, I found a workaround. goto print, select the Brother from the printer listing (after its setup with the new menu that's in there someplace), then do a print preview which does display it in portrait, click on the full width button on the menubar, then click on the print button on the preview screen. It is then printed portrait, full sized. Any other method prints it landscape, slightly smaller in scale and still with some of the bottom clipped off.

I feel like I'm playing connect the dots here folks. The excedrin headache number is approaching overflow status...

If your running openSUSE Linux you can put the ppd into /etc/cups/ppd/ . I assume other distros also put it there. Also you can up the cups web interface to set up the printer. The PPD will still wind up in /etc/cups/ppd. make sure its the right ppd for your printer.

Yes, I see the right one I copied in there yesterday, along with about every case variation of cups-pdf.ppd and a bunch of ppd.bak's, all gone now.

I've no idea why I have to jump thgrough so many hoops to get the correct size & orientation when printing from cups though.

And it would also be very very nice if gimp used the same drivers, sadly, no.

Thank you very much.

On Sunday 27 December 2009, upscope wrote:

On Sunday 27 December 2009 01:56:07 pm Gene Heskett wrote:

[...]
Thank you very much.

What version of GIMP do you have? I just went into mine and called up a .jpg, changed its size selected print and my printer (Xerox Color Phaser 6120) and it printed no set issue.

I have GIMP 2.6.7 from openSUSE repos'

[root@coyote etc]# rpm -q gimp
gimp-2.6.6-1.fc10.i386

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On Monday 28 December 2009, Akkana Peck wrote:

Gene Heskett writes:

So my question is: Where do I put the BR2140.ppd that cups uses so that the gutenprint plug-in can also find it? The regular print dialog has no knowledge of this printer, and nowhere near enough controls to be usable.

The regular (GTK) print dialog should see CUPS-registered printers.

Yes and no. It sees them, but I've had to add them before it works.

Gutenprint doesn't -- for Gutenprint you have to add each printer yourself, and it doesn't have drivers for a lot of printers that CUPS supports just fine,

Or reconfigure it by figuring out where to put the HL-2140.ppd.gz package, which I believe I have done now:
[root@coyote ups]# locate HL2140.ppd.gz /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/PPD/Brother/HL2140.ppd.gz /usr/share/ppd/HL2140.ppd.gz

So that one is working. And it now appears I need to do the same thing for my new NX-515 all-in-one, but that brings up another problem. I cannot leave the xsane dialog open to the scanner in it, and print at the same time, the print jobs then apparently go to /dev/null, and the printer icons green ready button in the FF display turns yellow, not red. I tried to use the NX515's built in copy function, but the copy was so bad it went straight to the round file. So if there are multiple pages to copy, I have to get them, save them, close out the xsane dialog, then reload, do any adjustments, and then print. And when the printing didn't work, it made a 20 minute job for 8 pages into a 4 hour job. Foomatics NX400.ppd almost works with this, as does mtink, but it says all the color tanks are empty all the time.

And mtink, I need working badly as the thing doesn't tell you which tank is low. Does it expect you to replace all 4 tanks at almost $90 USD everytime one runs out? If so, I will shortly have enough in this one to be able to afford a color laser, if I could stand the orange color of their reds.

Recommendations please?

Thanks.

For Gutenprint, try asking on the gimp-print list (they're friendly)

except for Waugh, its his way or the hiway, so I eventually unssubbed.

to find out if there's a way to install a ppd manually. https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gimp-print-devel

I resubscribed (I think) and posted a query there on 11/17/2009, but no replies have been received. No traffic from the list at all... Not even a reminder from mailman. I'll go see if it will let me login. No, so my subscription didn't stick.

rant mode ON!

Dammit I'm sick of sourceforge's CRS, enough so that I would never host a project of mine there. I'm a maintainer of the nitros9 project, and it forgot about me about a week after I setup the account 4 or 5 years ago so I haven't been able to do a cvs submission since and it won't let be setup a new account, claims I already exist. Fuggem.

/rant

It is then printed portrait, full sized. Any other method prints it landscape, slightly smaller in scale and still with some of the bottom clipped off.

I've had a lot of trouble controlling details like edges and borders. With my HP and the GTK print dialog, I managed briefly to get borderless (full bleed) prints, but something changed in the CUPS settings and now I get unpredictable margin sizes, and I haven't found the magic setting to turn borderless back on.

That option, as you know, comes from the driver, and is displayed and changeable from the gutenprint gui gimp calls here, and hasn't changed with any cups updates, currently at 1.3.11 here. However there are some miss-cues in the NX515 when being driven by the NX400 driver ppd, which is the newest one I can find. Trying some modes will only empty the paper chute for instance. My one message to the list did get there, and I offered to be a crash test dummy/mule, so I figured that would generate some traffic. No. And now I'm not subbed (again).

I didn't
have any better luck when I had an Epson and used Gutenprint. Accurate printing from GIMP still involves some luck and black magic.

That depends on the printer. My old C82, using the C84 driver ppd, was photo perfect, I've sold wedding prints out of it! Until after > 2 kilobucks in ink over many years and at least half a ton of paper, the print head finally failed. This NX515 I will need to fight with till its obsolete, at which point we may have a good driver for it. ;-) With luck. And that luck does NOT include sourceforge.

...Akkana

Thanks Akkana