Printing & Scanning Setup on the PSC Series

Many users have reported various print or scan problems with
the PSC all-in-one series. I have had none on my PSC1210.
So here are some comments.

First make certain that your kernel has support for USB
devices. You may need to load modules for usb-uhci,
usb printer, usb scanner, etc. Read your /var/log/syslog,
messages, etc files to verify that you have support
loaded for all of these devices or nothing below will
function.

Second, I have one PC and I am the only user, so I have
no need for spooler printing (CUPS, LPRNG, etc). I print
directly to the printer. I set an environmental variable
PRNDEV=/dev/usb/lp0 for this at boot time.

All of this has nothing to do with hpoj. I wrote this
simple executable (chmod +x lpr) bash script called lpr.
Useage
	lpr  quality  name_of_postscript_file
	quality is either 0 draft B&W
			  1 draft color
			  2 normal B&W
			  3 normal color
			  4 photo mode

#!/bin/bash
  Q=(1 1 0 0 2)             #each column corresponds to a mode for this
CM=(0 2 0 2 2)             #printer from the hpijs html docs
MT=(0 0 0 0 2)
PS=(0 2 0 2 2)
DPI=(300 300 600 600 600)
PRNDEV=/dev/usb/lp0
case $1 in
     [0-4] ) M=$1 ;;
         * ) exit ;;
esac
if   [[ $2 == '' ]]
then F=-
else F=$2
fi
IJSP=$(printf "%s%i,%s%i,%s%i,%s%i" "Quality:Quality=" ${Q[M]} \
	"Quality:ColorMode=" ${CM[M]} "Quality:MediaType=" \
	${MT[M]} "Quality:PenSet=" ${PS[M]})
gs  -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -dIjsUseOutputFD -sOutputFile=$PRNDEV \
	-r$DPI -sPAPERSIZE=letter -sDEVICE=ijs -sIjsServer=hpijs \
	-sDeviceManufacturer="HP" -sDeviceModel="psc 1200 series" \
	-sIjsParams="$IJSP" $F &>$DEV0

I have tested it with many different HP printers. It always works.
Just change the obvious parameters for your model as shown in the
hpijs html documentation.

Now for scanning I build hpoj according to the directions, run
ptal-init setup, etc and all works fine. But, note that
scanimage will not work nor issue an error if you specify
dimensions larger than what the device can be do. That's
given in millimeters and corresponds to an 8.5"x11" paper.
Also make sure you have "hpoj" uncommented in the file
/etc/sane/dll.conf.

I have encountered only one minor nuisance in this
technique. Between a scan and a print job, I need to
power off, then on, the PSC1210. I can live with it.
Something does not reset properly.

Guido



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