How to use serial printer with OS X? |
November, 27, 2002 9:33 PM |
brg15 |
Can I use my Epson Stylus 800 with my 8600? |
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RE: How to use serial printer with OS X? |
December, 02, 2002 4:23 PM |
wove |
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The adjustments for color provided are really not part of a color management system. Epson printers has color spaces defined for Kodak and Colorsync and perhaps other systems, but Gimp Print can not use them. The Grimp Print project mentions that they hope to add color management to the printer drivers in a future release. Just as a side note I have found that OS X does not automatically pick up Colorsync profiles for older devices that might be stored in the OS 9 system folder. To use these profiles in OS X you must copy them to the profile folder inside the Colorsync folder which is inside the library folder. bill For some reason posting from Navigator/Chimera to this forum does not seem to maintain formatting. |
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RE: How to use serial printer with OS X? |
December, 01, 2002 4:05 PM |
willschou1 |
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Color management and nearly anything else you might want to adjust for your Printer is available if you know how to find it! In fact it is easy to mess things up as there are so many things that can be adjusted! Open your web browser in OSX of course: type in: http://localhost:631/ This gives you access to the secret controls of Cups which are built into OSX Jaguar. Click on Manage Printer then Configure Printer there you will find Color management and much more! Later Will S |
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RE: How to use serial printer with OS X? |
December, 01, 2002 1:23 PM |
wove |
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Cups and Gimp Print do a nice job of printing from OS X. The only complaint I have about the drivers is that that do not support any color management. That makes it all but impossible to really get a great color print. Mostly for printing day to day items this matters very little and boy it is nice to see the old printers getting some support. I have found however that it is very hard to really get a good photo quality print using the drivers. The detail and resolution is excellent, however the colors are off. Gimp print is a very nicely packaged application for OS X, instructions are well done, install is painless and the list of supported printers is very long. bill |
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RE: How to use serial printer with OS X? |
November, 28, 2002 2:49 AM |
willschou1 |
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Subject: A re-post of how to use your serial Printer in OSX Cc: Bcc: X-Attachments: The one missing piece to moving to OSX was printing. I could of course move to a new USB printer . My Epson 850 Color Stylus printer isn't all that old and works really well. I hate wasting things and replacing something that isn't broken and works well isn't my idea of sensible spending. I had all but given up on this fight when along comes. CUPS and Gimp Print!!! Cups is Common Unix Printing System and Mac Gimp print is I believe a port from Linux for Mac PPC. Together you can print to most any Serial Printer with a Parallel port or Ethernet port/adapter.(most serial printers have a parallel port for Windows use. It saves the company from making 2 models ) There is a list of over 300 printers made by HP,Canon,Epson and Lexmark. A few others may also work. I'd heard Cups mentioned but had no idea what it was or how I could get it to work. I did a google web search for Cups and with a bit of reading I found what i needed to know! Cups comes with Jaguar but is a hidden program. You need to have installed the BSD layer when installing OSX 10.2 which you did if you did the default install. Gimp Print you get by going to: http://www.allosx.com/1030154694/index_html here you will find all the info you need! It is I think open source which means it's free and works as well as the Epson Drivers and does everything they do on Fully Supported machines with the exception of Utilities ie checking ink level and alignment etc.(they are hoping for this in the future and already have it for Linux!) On this page you will find a link for a list of supported printers and how much support they have many common machines have full support! Don't download the software mentioned near the beginning but go down a ways to "A newer version of gimp-print" highlighted in pink on my web page in I. Explorer. It is the latest release for OSX and is an easy no using Terminal install. There are a few tricks to setting things up but it comes with very good info to read and follow. Gimp Print uses The Print Center for printing just like Supported machines so it works just like an out of the box supported printer once it is setup. Extras needed: You will need a USB PCI card for your machine. You don't need to buy an expensive Mac card but you can if you want to! Most any card labeled "Open HCI Specification' or "Microsoft OHCI based drivers" should work. There is another spec for USB cards which doesn't work in Macs. I don't remember what it's called and it isn't very common. I'm told 2 port cards are more of a sure thing then 4 port cards but this may no longer be an issue but was in the past. I bought a SIIG 2 port USB PCi card and it works fine. Cost like low $20.00's there are now really cheap cards that may well work fine. You also need a USB to Parallel cable. I went to my local Fry's and they had HP cables for $59.00 and Epson Cables for $49.00. That was more then I wanted to spend. I went over to the PC section and found one for $39.00 that mentioned in small print it worked with both Windows and Macs. I then saw a $19.99 cable which only said Windows but looking at the fine print I saw the same "IEEE 1284 Compliant" listed on both. I knew I was taking a chance but I bought the $19.99" inland USB Parallel Converter "Cable stock no.08305. The cable is a bit lighter then the expensive Mac cables but not cheap nor to thin looking. It did come with Windows drivers which made me a bit worried in case i needed Mac Drivers. I got home hooked it up to the Epson 850 printer's parallel port. Turned on the printer installed the Gimp Print software. Setup this software for my printer and it Printed the first time! It did fine with type and a color.jpg of my sisters kid. The setup is a bit tricky but there is good info to follow. So just be careful to read it all. I have all the same settings for my printer in OSX as I do in OS 9. So a bunch of guys can come up with this and Epson has nothing for us but new machines...?? Who needs them! A couple of things that don't work normal yet but do have work arounds. Some Apps like anything from Adobe and a few others can't directly print from Gimp Print but need to be opened with the OSX app 'Preview' and then printed from there. They hope to fix this in the future. If you need to print in Postscript there is extra software called "ESP GhostScript" It is also a free download. All this and more is listed in the info on the above page. Can you tell I'm excited! It only cost me $19.99 to get my old printer working!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've moved OSX to my faster IDE Drive hooked to the Sonnet Tempo ATA 66 PCI card. All works really well. It isn't as fast as OS 9.x but it is plenty fast enough! I can see soon I won't be using OS9.x much at all. Will S PS. The final version of Gimp Print 4.2.4 is available at this address. Includes more drivers and extra software for Post script printing http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php3 Will S |
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RE: How to use serial printer with OS X? |
November, 27, 2002 11:38 PM |
mjoecups358 |
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It's not a supported setup, but I am kind of thinking it might be possible with the addition of CUPS in 10.2. Perhaps researching CUPS serial printing setups will provide you with a way to get there... There are also USB to serial adapters, which is kind of stupid, but also should work. |