TurboPrint and CUPS

While catching up on some reading in a Tux magazine from
June last year
I saw reference to TurboPrint [1] as a tool to get a wide
range of
printers functioning under linux.  Free for home use, a
range of prices
- US$38 to $108 - for various licences).  We have an S6300
here which
can print on A3 paper and I had not managed to locate
drivers for it. 
Any printing I have needed to do had meant I needed to go to
Windows in
VMware (be it A4 or A3). 

It took a total of about 10 minutes to locate the RPM for
TurboPrint and
install, run xtpsetup to add the Canon printer, which was
then available
in CUPS [2] where I successfully printed a test page. 
Marvellous!  CUPS
also successfully recognised our network Ricoh 3025
printer/photocopier/scanner and easily set up basic
printing
functionality (though most of the more advanced features
available under
Windows do not appear to be available).  Total time invested
- around 20
minutes.

Has put a smile on my linux face today, and means even less
need to use
an XP virtual machine in future.  Motivates me to keep more
up to date
with my reading!

Cheers,
Roger

[1]  http://www.turb
oprint.de/english.html
(available in .deb, .rpm and .tgz)

[2] http://localhost:631/
(which is something I learnt today as well)  (or KDE >
Utilities >
Printing > Manage Printing)

On Thu 08 Mar 2007 13:01:29 NZDT +1300, Roger Searle wrote:

> While catching up on some reading in a Tux magazine
from June last year
> I saw reference to TurboPrint [1] as a tool to get a
wide range of
> printers functioning under linux.  Free for home use, a
range of prices
> - US$38 to $108 - for various licences).

Yes, TurboPrint is underrated in my opinion. Btw home use is
30EUR, up
from there for business etc. Fair price. It works more or
less
flawlessly and is a no-brainer to install. Iintegrates well
into yast
too, and is the only commercial app also available in
64bit.

There's more to TurboPrint than meets the eye. Stability for
example.
The colour you print in 2 years will still be the same you
printed 2
years ago. It's predictable and reliable.

In contrast, open source printing is free, but colours
change with every
version, as does everything else. Currently, gutenprint
enforces a
humangeous unprintable area on every printer, including
those which can
do margin-less printing. Worse, editing the printable-area
setting in
the PPD file gives any results but the desired - the area is
hardcoded
in the driver! (Editing the ppd works fine with TurboPrint).
Margins
worked fine in the previous version (aka gimpprint). And as
I found out
a week ago, printing with at least gimp scales A4 down to
fit within the
enforced printable area, instead of scaling to A4 (i.e.
none) and
clipping, with no way to turn off this mangling. Shoddy
design for no
obvious reason.

The only complaint I have with TurboPrint is that the ink
amount
reduction never worked for me. If you get it to work, please
let me
know.

Volker

-- 
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