PCL only printer

[Paul Yeatman <pyeatman@ucsd.edu>]

Hi, I recently inherited an HP Deskjet 932C printer.  Apparently this
only uses the PCL printer language.  As I need to be able to print
postscript for this to be of much use to me, I've been struggling to
make this happen.

I'm running stable Debian using lprng and ifhp as printer software.
According to ifhp documentation, I need to us ghostscript to convert a
postscript to (I suppose) PCL so that it can be printed on a printer
like mine.  Ultimately, this can be setup in the ifhp config file but
I'm trying to successfully show that I can do this with ghostscript,
'gs', alone first.

This is where I am stopped (I can't get it to work with ifhp right off
the bat so I'm going one step at a time: get it to work with 'gs'
first).  According to 'man gs', I should be able to run something like
'gs -sDEVICE=hpijs file.ps' to have file.ps print directly to the
printer for which "hpijs" is a driver.  Having experimented with many
drivers, one of which should definitely work with my printer, I
continue to get:

	GNU Ghostscript 6.53 (2002-02-13)
	Copyright (C) 2002 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved.
	This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file COPYING for details.
	Error: /invalidfileaccess in --.outputpage--
	<blah blah blah>

If I look up this error in the gs documentation, it seems to address
it perfectly:

	"Since /dev/lpi can be opened only for exclusive use, if
	another job has it open (engine_ctl_sparc or another
	Ghostscript are the most likely candidates), Ghostscript stops
	with "Error: /invalidfileaccess in --.outputpage--"

	In case of common printer problems like being out of paper, a
	warning describing the reason is printed to stdout. The driver
	tries access again each five seconds. Due to a problem with the
	device driver (in the kernel) the reason for printer failure
	isn't always reported correctly to the program. This is the
	case, for instance, if you open the top cover (error E5 on the
	printer's display). Look at the display on the printer itself
	if a "Printer problem with unknown reason" is reported. Fatal
	errors cause the print job to be terminated."

The only problem is that my printer is sitting there ready (it has no
problem printing a simple text file) and there is no reason I can think
of that "another job has [/dev/lpi] open".  First off, what is
/dev/lpi?  This didn't exist for me so I made it a link to /dev/lp0 to
try to cover my bases.  Still no success.

I get the same result with any reasonable driver name I try with 'gs'.
Any help?

Thanks,
Paul

-- 
Paul Yeatman       (858) 534-9896        pyeatman@ucsd.edu
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