[Foomatic] Using usb IDs for autodetection

Joe Shaw joe at ximian.com
Wed Apr 14 10:03:36 PDT 2004


On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 10:05 +0200, Johannes Meixner wrote:
> YaST chooses the recommended Foomatic PPD file which is what several
> experts think what hopefully normal users may regard as what you call
> the "best" driver.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'd hope it would do.  My beef is that it
shows more than one per printer.  As a user, how am I supposed to make
the distinction between "HP FooJet 4000 foomatic/hpijs blah blah
whatever" and "HP FooJet 4000 foomatic/Postscript bar quux baz"?  I
shouldn't need to, that's my point.

> Please tell me what you think is the best printer driver for the
> HP DeskJet 550C
> HP DeskJet 990C
> HP LaserJet 1200
> HP LaserJet 4000
> then I will tell you why you are wrong.

Well, I don't care.  It should just use whatever the "best" one is.
"Best" is tricky to quantify, and "best" does not necessarily mean
"works in all cases every time" -- although it should... we're just not
there yet.  But I think you need to be willing to make tradeoffs.  Use
cases can help here a lot, but the bottom line is that I think that
picking "HP FooJet 4000" and being able to print two sides but not have
it automatically staple things for me is better than me having to
effectively flip a coin to pick a driver and half of the time not being
able to print at all.

> > Mac OS obviously can only autoconfigure printers it knows about.
> 
> As it works much better in Mac OS than in Linux it seems that Apple
> is better supported by printer manufacturers than Linux (I assume
> Apple does not buy any new printer model to find out the autodetection
> IDs and the "best" driver on their own).
> 
> Perhaps the name Novell helps us to get more support by the printer
> manufacturers so that we can provide more data for Foomatic - see
> http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/11/jsmeix_print-info-for-manufacturers.html

I certainly hope so!  I've been prodding my superiors about this, I hope
you'll do the same!

Thanks,
Joe





More information about the Printing-foomatic mailing list