Author Topic: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?  (Read 41985 times)

Mike Snyder

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How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« on: March 02, 2018, 06:30:45 pm »
I just bought an HP OfficeJet Pro 8740 multifunction printer.  It supports Postscript 3 emulation, according to HP, and their Universal Postscript Driver does work in Windows 7.  Is it possible to extract a .ppd file from the Windows driver installer files that could be imported into the ArcaOS5 Postscript driver?  The printer works with the .ppd file from a Linux CUPS installation, but it doesn't offer the choices of which tray, which paper sizes, etc., that the Universal Postscript Driver does.

ak120

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #1 on: March 02, 2018, 08:11:56 pm »
Later versions of IBM's PostScript printer driver for OS/2 include some tools for importing the PPD file. There are also different versions from third parties derived from the DCDDK source code. So this procedure should still apply.

I hope this message will pass the censorship. So I should better not write about extracting resources or files from Windows self-extracting archives with native OS/2 tools. That's the time when the Linux kids start to piss on command.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #2 on: March 02, 2018, 08:55:17 pm »
Andreas, if you read your message you will notice that your second paragraph is complete useless. Do you really want to help OS/2 users or you want to complain forever? If you want to be banned it is going to be your fault, not the one of the person that press the "ban button".

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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... just share the dream.

Pete

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2018, 09:12:03 pm »
Hi Michael

The hplip supplied driver claims to fully support that printer from driver release 3.16.5 - see https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/supported_devices/index

Not sure what level the current os/2 port of that driver is at... Looking at http://rpm.netlabs.org/release/00/i386/i686/ I see hplip-3.16.11-1.oc00.i686.rpm so looks like you should be able to get the ppd file from that package.


Regards

Pete

roberto

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2018, 10:09:42 pm »
In my opinion I would use this option to have *all the features of your printer* in a driver.
http://www.altsan.org/os2/printing/#psprint

The first thing is to extract the ppd from some linux version and convert it to the os2 format.
To do this you open the ppd file, write a space character, delete it, and save it.
From here you use the program PSPRINT.DRV version 30.905, see the readme.
Saludos


ivan

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #5 on: March 02, 2018, 11:14:16 pm »
I agree with Andreas regarding a PPD extracted from the windows driver package - they produce better output than the Linux ones, at least with my Brother colour laser network postscript printers. 

I have tried both the win and linux PPD in side by side blind tests and left it for friends to decide which they liked best.  In all 15 cases they preferred the win based output.  It could be because the Linux version is designed for use with cups  whereas the win one is for direct printing.

Mike Snyder

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #6 on: March 03, 2018, 04:02:50 am »
I have the windows postscript driver installed.  When I search for *.ppd in Windows, it shows me a location for hpcu210s.ppd in a subdirectory of \Windows\system32 , but when I look in that subdirectory, there is no .ppd file there.  My problem is how to copy it from wherever it is in Windows so that I can import it into an OS/2 postscript driver.

Dave Yeo

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #7 on: March 03, 2018, 06:35:30 am »
xcopy \Windows\system32\hpcu210s.ppd x:\
Where x: is a fat32 formatted drive, perhaps a USB stick. Or adjust the destination.

ak120

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2018, 01:10:50 pm »
I have the windows postscript driver installed.  When I search for *.ppd in Windows, it shows me a location for hpcu210s.ppd in a subdirectory of \Windows\system32 , but when I look in that subdirectory, there is no .ppd file there.  My problem is how to copy it from wherever it is in Windows so that I can import it into an OS/2 postscript driver.
The corresponding PPD is packaged inside a Windows cabinet file (for example psi2enww.cab). You can simply use PKZIP /FIX on the installation SFX archive (downloaded) to create a Zip-Archive that could be extracted under OS/2 or similar systems. Now a cab extraction utility with LZX support can decompress the PPD text file. ISOLatin1 should work out of the box for US systems.

ak120

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #9 on: March 04, 2018, 03:05:18 pm »
Andreas, if you read your message you will notice that your second paragraph is complete useless.
It seems that your kinky expectations are cushioned against reality. Persecution mania?

Ian Manners

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #10 on: March 04, 2018, 04:44:33 pm »
Martin's reply is in relation to this post up the top, and as he states, the second paragraph.

Quote
Later versions of IBM's PostScript printer driver for OS/2 include some tools for importing the PPD file. There are also different versions from third parties derived from the DCDDK source code. So this procedure should still apply.

I hope this message will pass the censorship. So I should better not write about extracting resources or files from Windows self-extracting archives with native OS/2 tools. That's the time when the Linux kids start to piss on command.

You are free to say that but it's still pointless. Your first paragraph was spot on, you get a gold star :)

Cheers
Ian B Manners

Mike Snyder

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #11 on: March 07, 2018, 09:58:12 pm »
I managed to copy the HP universal postscript driver from Windows 7, but apparently I managed to break something.  I imported the .ppd file with instPDR.exe.  Every application that can print now crashes either when it loads, like OpenOffice, or shows an access violation when I try to print from it, like e.exe.  The .trp files show a shared memory access violation.

How do I completely remove the installed postscript driver so that I can then import the .ppds from my Lexmark e260dn and the OfficeJet Pro 8740 from Linux, which worked without crashing?

Pete

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #12 on: March 08, 2018, 12:54:30 am »
Hi Michael

A case of delete the printer object that uses the driver, clean up the printer related ini file entries using prndrv - http://www.os2site.com/sw/comm/faxworks/prndrv.exe - then delete pscript/psprint.drv (whichever you used) and replace with a virgin copy.


Regards

Pete

Mike Snyder

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #13 on: March 08, 2018, 01:03:51 am »
Is the driver that actually drives the printer
x:\os2\dll\pscript\pscript.drv
or
x:\sys\install\prndrv\pmdd_0\pscript.drv

Pete

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Re: How to find or extract a Postscript printer driver?
« Reply #14 on: March 08, 2018, 04:04:36 am »
Hi Michael

The installed driver that you have added the ppd file to should be \os2\dll\pscript\pscript.drv - the pscript.drv within the \sys\install subdirectory should be the "virgin" driver.

Can I suggest that you try the psprint.drv version which you should find in \sys\install\PRNDRV\PMDD_6 - this is basically an updated version of pscript.drv with a few bug fixes and works better than pscript.drv for me (and probably more than a few other people). You may want to have a glance through the readme file before deciding which postscript driver to install.


Regards

Pete