Getting a new printer

[Andi B.]

If you use the Manage Printers GUI then there's no need to clean the PPD manually - just select Import PPD from the menu and it will handle all of that automatically.

Does it import more than one ppd files too? I've tried to import at least 4 ppds for different printers in the lasts 20 years. Most of them with the IBM cli tools before your versions come up. I'm thinking about if it's worth starting from scratch again.

Btw. I've sometimes still the problem with your psndrv (?) that it takes very long until the page came out. Sometimes pages are printed only after a reboot. Also I can't still print with small margins (less than 12,xmm). Although one of my printers allow 4-5mm the other can print without any margin on the other system. Maybe my setup is mess up hence the question to the expert on this topic :-).

[ivan]

As a matter of interest I have imported both of my printers ppd so I assume that you can import more if necessary.

[Alex Taylor]

Does it import more than one ppd files too? I've tried to import at least 4 ppds for different printers in the lasts 20 years. Most of them with the IBM cli tools before your versions come up. I'm thinking about if it's worth starting from scratch again.

Sure, you can import more than one PPD. Every PPD you import is saved in \sys\install\prndrv\ppd_xx and kept whenever a new import is done.

Btw. I've sometimes still the problem with your psndrv (?) that it takes very long until the page came out. Sometimes pages are printed only after a reboot. Also I can't still print with small margins (less than 12,xmm). Although one of my printers allow 4-5mm the other can print without any margin on the other system. Maybe my setup is mess up hence the question to the expert on this topic :-).

Margin capabilities are defined by the PPD. Laser printers as a rule have a minimum margin size. Only certain inkjets can do margin-less printing TTBOMK.

Performance could be caused by any number of things. The first thing I'd check is whether the IBM PSCRIPT driver behaves the same.

One thing to try is reducing the print job size by tweaking the font download settings (this is highly dependent on what type of job you are printing so there's no set rule for it; try printing to file and comparing the file sizes with different settings).

If the printer's Postscript emulation is simply slow, you could also try printing as image (some apps like Lucide have a setting for this).

[beregond]

So, I now have the DCP-L3560cdw. If I understand this, the Linux ppd is inside an rpm-file. How do I extract it?

As for CUPS, I do not see that printer in the list. Is there an update I would need?

[Alex Taylor]

For importing into OS/2 (pscript or psprint) then it's generally better to use the Windows PPD instead of the Linux one.  You should be able to find it somewhere on the driver disk or from the  manufacturer's website.

As noted earlier, you shouldn't really need CUPS just to print from traditional OS/2 applications. However, you would need CUPS to print from applications that don't support the native OS/2 print system (like most of those written in Qt).

To get the printer supported in CUPS it's normally a matter of finding out which CUPS driver package supports it (there are several), and installing that.  (Or you could just select a generic Postscript printer as the CUPS model, if you don't need model-specific features.)