CUPS and Epson Epson WF-3540 on FreeBSD 9.2/11.0-CURRENT

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2013, Charles Swiger wrote:

> Hi--
>
> On Nov 5, 2013, at 11:58 AM, O. Hartmann <ohartman at zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>> I don't think it's likely you'll find this working. I'd suggest you
>>> find a printer that can natively speak postscript and works with SANE
>>> without a proprietary driver. It's getting hard to find printers that
>>> can do this, though.
>>
>> A pity.
>> I think it is hard to find an ink-jet printer that "speaks" natively
>> PS. Mots of them I saw have their proprietary BLOB driver managing the
>> communication if they are multi-function-systems - mostly Linux.
>
> It costs money to license a real PostScript interpreter from Adobe, which
> means that the cheaper inkjets won't pony up for that capability.

Ghostscript supports a number of native inkjet page description 
languages.  I have a couple of older Epson inkjets that I think 
Ghostscript will drive directly.

> It looks like the Lexmark Pro4000 and the HP OfficeJet 276dw are sanely priced
> PostScript-capable inkjets, but there are literally hundreds of laser printers
> around which have native PostScript support, and their cost-per-page usually
> is much more reasonable than inkjets end up being.

Maybe those models are fine, but generally higher-end inkjets are 
disproportionately priced.  And because few people buy them, those extra 
features are not heavily tested.

Relevant articles:

This one shows setting up a print filter with Ghostscript:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/lpdprinting.html

And this talks about the value of a used office laser printer:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/usedlasers.html