on Sat, May 05, 2001 at 01:39:24PM -0400, Glenn Becker (glenn@icarus.usanetworks.com) wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have lived w/o a printer both at home and at work for some time now. If
> I need anything printed I've done so from a Mac or Windows PC. Probably
> sheer laziness.
>
> Now, however, I want to do a bit of self-publishing (poetry), and I'm
> losing the printer tied to the Mac at home, so I will soon need to
> explore printing from my Debian box.
>
> As you can tell, I'm utterly clueless - what kind of a printer should
> I get? I'll be printing mainly formatted text documents (whether
> formatted in something like Abiword or something else, I haven't
> decided).
>
> Will any PC-compatible printer do? What are the considerations, here?
No.
Most WinPrinters won't work. Some will. Many are not advertised as
such, making identification painful. YMMV.
This leave printers divided among inkjets, laserjets, some high-end
photographic printers, plotters, even some dot matrix, etc. And the
postscript/non-postscript school.
Inkjets suck, are slow, are expensive to run, and tend toward poor
quality. Many are also stealth WinPrinters -- they won't work under
GNU/Linux but don't advertise the fact. Color is vastly overrated, and
can be obtained for reasonable costs from a local reprographics
franchise (Kinko's, etc.) when it's really needed.
My suggestion: get a used, HP LaserJet system with postscript and
built-in networking. In my case, an HPLJ4 with postscript and (IIRC)
NetDirect card, for about $350. It's good for about 5-6 PPM (hella
faster than my old inkjet), and the duty cycle is way long. Biggest
bitch is the power draw, but the unit comes online in a matter of
seconds and is rarely more than a few feet from where I want it to be.
The printer is accessible over the network from any of the attached
systems.
For folks in the Silicon Valley area, I can't recommend Fast Copier /
Print Service too much:
Fast Copier/Print Service
(650) 938-1016
2455 Old Middlefield Way #N
Mountain View, CA
...ask for Reggie.
Elsewhere, you might check listings on eBay or your local used HW
outlet.
Cheers.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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