TurboPrint & PrintFab

Hi,

I bought my wife an HP Photoshop Pro B9180 so that she would be able to print out and sell her artwork. We've had many problems getting the supplied windows HP print driver to behave despite many months dialogue with HP support, many ruined prints and much wasted ink.

My father-in-law recommended I try TurboPrint, and over the last few weeks, I have managed to get TurboPrint to behave much more predictably in Linux than the HP supplied driver via windows.

Whereas my wife runs Windows XP (due to poor Aiptek tablet drivers in Linux), I prefer to run a Linux based operating system and have exposed our day-to-day B&W printer through cups via an old laptop as a printserver to the home network. I'd like to do the same for the B9180, but all my attempts so-far have cropped (and perhaps scaled) the image to a 5mm uniform non-printed border, printing via chaining cups servers for my linux systems and via Windows print-server to cups.

This was a circa £500 attempt to setup a networked RIP enabled entry level professional printing syatem.

My question is: Should it be possible to do this, where is the 5mm border entering the workflow, and can It be quashed?

Thanks,
Mike

Hello,

TurboPrint offers "borderless" page sizes. E.g. to print a document on A4 in borderless mode, choose "A4 borderless" in the application.

How do you transfer the artwork from the Windows PC to the Linux computer?
One possibility would be to export TIFF images and print them under Linux using GIMP and the TurboPrint print plugin (gimp file menu entry "TurboPrint...").

zedonet wrote:Hello,

TurboPrint offers "borderless" page sizes. E.g. to print a document on A4 in borderless mode, choose "A4 borderless" in the application.

How do you transfer the artwork from the Windows PC to the Linux computer?
One possibility would be to export TIFF images and print them under Linux using GIMP and the TurboPrint print plugin (gimp file menu entry "TurboPrint...").

Thanks. To do this in my case I would have to run gimp over an exported display served from a relatively low spec laptop (hidden in the cupboard under the stairs, or as I call it: the print room ).

Yes A4 borderless works printing directly from the machine with Turboprint installed and at the moment I can just scp files across -- this may be my best option but you've hit upon the crux of the question: how to transfer files to the machine with the drivers...
I'm wanting to expose the print server as a generic PS printer to the rest of my home network and have cups serve the printer and Turboprint handle the rendering:

• On my print server I have installed Turboprint and thus can lpr *.ps and *.pdf files which print borderless as expected with e.g. "lpr -PB9128 file.ps". It is set to use Borderless A4 by default.
  
  On my windows machine I can create a new printer instance using a generic PS printer driver (two such driver options seem to be available one by MS and one by Adobe) and point this instance at a network port defined by http://192.168.1.102/printers/B9180 which is the cups instance of the B9128 on the print server set up to use the Turboprint driver -- but when printing, somewhere in this set-up a border is introduced.
  
  On my other linux machine I can use its cups interface to do likewise selecting a raw printer driver and pointing it at the print server's cups endpoint -- but again a border is introduced.

Given that both the remote connection introduce borders into the print I'm guessing (though I could easily be wrong) that it's the cups server on the print server that is introducing the border/scaling and am looking for tips on how i might be able to remedy this.

The aim is to be able to print a multi-page PS or PDF file (borderless) from the windows machine. Ideally HP should provide a driver which is able to manage this directly, but it generally only prints 90% of the pages correctly. hence my interest in what Turboprint might be able to achieve.

A solution might be our upcoming Windows driver version. It offers basically the same features as TurboPrint / Linux and can also be used to print to a Linux server with TurboPrint.

If you are interested, I can send you a beta test version soon.

zedonet wrote:A solution might be our upcoming Windows driver version. It offers basically the same features as TurboPrint / Linux and can also be used to print to a Linux server with TurboPrint.

If you are interested, I can send you a beta test version soon.

Yes, (despite my inner Linux geek) I'd be interested. Happy to evaluate. Do you have formal evaluation criteria or would you be happy for free form feedback?

M.

Very good - free form feedback is sufficient.

zedonet wrote:Very good - free form feedback is sufficient.

Hi zedonet, I'm afraid the windows machine contracted a virus and I've moved the system across to Linux (despite its poor tablet support).

I won't be able to test the win32 features after all.

The chaining of cups-s is still an interesting question, but not nearly as urgent as getting a direct working printer.... Will install the full TP on the (now ex-windows) machine.

Rgds,
Mike