On Wed, 23 Mar 2011, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 01:49:21AM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>
>> I guess I had no problem with any of the printers at work and there are 
>> at least four etirely different printers there.
>
> UofM has reasonably competent system and network admins.

Right, but they don't support Linux in my department, so all they gave me 
were the IP addresses.  Is it hard to properly set up the printer on the 
network?


>> I guess they all take postscript input, which is easy to deal with.
>
> All high-end (workgroup or department) printers grok postscript.
>
>> Maybe all printers are postscript these days.
>
> Ha!  The printers that are sold for a price of a full ink 
> toner/cartridge and whose 'trial' cartridge is only 25% full do not have 
> a $4 postscript engine.  Lexmark, cheap Canons and HP, they still rely 
> on the Windows driver for most of their processing.

I should have known those cheap printers couldn't handle postscript!  But 
the open printing and CUPS lists will help a lot (thanks, guys):

http://www.openprinting.org/printers
http://www.cups.org/ppd.php

The thing is, I don't want to spend a lot on a home printer.  I could drop 
both the color and duplex features.  If I can print boarding passes and 
sheet music, that's probably enough (I do most printing at work), and 
those need neither color nor duplex.  Having the printer on the home 
network would help a lot, though.  So maybe I can live without postscript, 
too.  I'm revising my plan:

(1) works with Linux
(2) networkable
(3) less than $150

If it does color and duplex, that's good, but if not, that's OK.  I can 
always get around the duplexing issue by printing every other page and 
refeeding them (I think it's usually even pages in reverse order, then odd 
pages in normal order).

Mike