Re: Printing color on HP682C

[Michael Loßin <phallobst@xxxxxx>]

Stephen Casner wrote:
> 
> I have installed the apsfilter-6.1.1 package on FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE
> and run SETUP to configure for network access to an HP DeskJet 682C
> printer (680C series) connected to a Windows 98 server.

See also:
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=75520

> I observed that "gs -h" (for 6.50) lists hpdj680c as one of the known
> devices, but SETUP does not include it in the listing of built-in
> devices (i.e., file printer-6.50), so I could not select it.  The 680C
> is listed as one of the printers supported by hpdj, so I chose the
> hpdj device.

Is "hpdj680c" part of the original ghostscript release, or is it
just a patched-on driver? Using "hpdj" with a generic model is
probably some completely different approach.

> The communication through samba worked fine, but the test page was
> printed monochrome.  I saw a message in the archive saying that hpdj
> defaults to b/w (even though COLOR=color, which seems strange), so I

Bad design decision to default to b/w printing...

> tried "lpr -C cmyk test.ps" to print the test page again.  That does
> print in color, and the RGB triangle looks reasonable, but the CMY
> triangle doesn't look right: the vertices are near white, and there
> are sharp color boundaries in a Y shape dividing the triangle into
> three arrowhead shapes.  The color along the line from C to Y
> increases in yellow to the color boundary at the midpoint where the
> color changes to saturated cyan and fades heading toward the Y
> vertex.  Is that what I should expect?

What you should expect is what you see when you view the test page
with gv, or with gs on the command line.

Apparently, the 682C is not directly supported by "hpdj" (which
may be caused by glitches like the ones you've seen). It seems
that the 682C was omitted intentionally.

> I tried patching the printer-specific apsfilterrc file to
> PRINTER='hpdj680c' which gives the same b/w output as hpdj but does
> not print color if -C cmyk is added.  I see in the apsfilter script
> that the printer hpdj680c would not be recognized for device-specific
> options and that's why I don't get color.  But if I hack the script to
> add that printer name to the case so -s ColorMode=CMYK is output, or
> if I define GS_FEATURES="-sColorMode=CMYK", I still get only b/w
> output.

Maybe the option is something different for the actual "hpdj680c"
driver. Please read the documentation for that driver, if available.

> If I want color printing to work as the default, is my best choice to
> set PRINTER='hpdj' and GS_FEATURES="-sColorMode=CMYK" in the printer's
> apsfilterrc file?

If you are a brave soul, you might try to use the latest ghostscript
in connection with the pcl3 or hpijs driver. But you also have to use
the latest, on-the-edge, unofficial and largely untested :^D
preview of apsfilter-7.0...

http://briefcase.yahoo.com/losse   -> Software -> apsfilter-experimental
http://home.t-online.de/home/Martin.Lottermoser/pcl3.html 
http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/


HTH
Michael