Printing in OS X
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Our Day Has Come |
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Ralph Richards hooks up a DesignJet 250C with Print Pro I was having trouble getting Gimp-Print set up -- mainly the whole problem of IP addresses, etc -- even with your Bullpen help. I checked out Easy Software Products Print Pro 4.4 this morning and I am now up and printing. I DID have to read the manual but am completely happy and purchased a license for $49. Each license is tied to a specific machine but they also have site licenses available for $249 I believe. Now I have NO real ties to OS 9! The setup I'm using is: HP 250C plotter, HP JetDirect 500X print server (firmware is a little old, but I need to take it to a friend's windoze machine to upgrade the firmware), NetGear FVS318 cable/dsl router and eight- port switch After reading the directions that came with Print Pro I printed the setup/info sheets directly from the print server and found out its IP address. I did not change this from the factory setting. I installed the Print Pro software as per directions. To add the license number you have to sign in as root and use the terminal -- but they are very good about providing exact directions. With the IP address I then started Print Pro's administration mode through a browser using http://127.0.0.1:631/printers as the address. The 127.0.0.1 is the actual address for Local Host which doesn't work correctly on Macs for some reason. |
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This is the main screen. |
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This is the "add printer" page. I filled it out for my printer as shown below. |
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This is the setup page form my printer. |
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This is the configuration page. After this is done it shows up in the printer setup and print dialog boxes just like a regular PS printer. Print quality is "different" from PowerPlot 2.0.3. I've not done enough printing to give a good qualitative report. Line weights seem to be a little heavier. Under the hood it is using Gimp-Print and GhostScript so this should be the same quality as those. Print Pro provides a nice front end for maintaining and installing printers. And the $49 per license ($250 per site, I believe) is cheap compared to the time I had tried to setup previously. They also supply a couple of stand alone applications for managing printers & license numbers. I find the browser interface to work best, but now looking in the setup stuff in the stand alone program I see LOTS of parameters that were set by Print Pro. I hope this helps. This is a quick overview, but it really was pretty simple. I'm loving the OS X version of PowerCADD and WildTools. I no longer boot into OS 9 AT ALL except to resave a Quark document to open in InDesign or some access some old FullWrite documents. Thanks again for your help and work. Every time I look at a windoze CAD program I start shaking. Ralph Richards Since I wrote the above, I decided to try out the trial version of Microspot XRIP. I did get it setup and printing, but at the same time it screwed up my Print Pro installation -- perhaps it was my fault. So . . . I deleted the MicroSPOT and reinstalled Print Pro. Going through the installation of Print Pro I realized there are two ways to set up many HP printers (perhaps others as well). For instance, my 250C I set up using PrintPro and then a second instance of the same printer using CUPS/gimp-print, etc. While they use the same PS 3 interpreter the options are different, and they seem to print differently. I'm not sure which one I like better and I don't have the time needed today to make an accurate comparison. It also seems that I short changed the included stand-alone
application. I tried it out again, and it works equally well
to the browser based setup. The I supplied the 192.168.0.2 (correct IP - the previous one
I gave you was wrong) and the ipp/port2 part. The browser program
(built in web server) Ralph |
