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Christopher Negus

"Linux Bible, 2008 Edition: Boot up to Ubuntu, Fedora, KNOPPIX, Debian, openSUSE, and 11 Other Distributions"


Avoid printers that are referred to as Winprinters. These printers use nonstandard printing interfaces
(those other than PostScript or PCL). Support for these low-end printers is hit or miss. For example,
some low-end HP DeskJet printers use the pnm2ppa driver to print documents in Printing
Performance Architecture (PPA) format. Some Lexmark printers use the pbm217k driver to print.
Although drivers are available for many of these Winprinters, many of them are not fully supported.
Ghostscript may also support your printer; if it does, you can use it to do your printing. Ghostscript
(found at www.ghostscript.com) is a free PostScript-interpreter program. It can convert PostScript
content to output that can be interpreted by a variety of printers. Both GNU and Aladdin Ghostscript
drivers are available. Although the latest Aladdin drivers are not immediately released under the
GPL, you can use older Aladdin drivers that are licensed under the GNU.
You??™ll find an excellent list of printers supported in Linux at www.linux-foundation.org/
en/OpenPrinting (select the Printers link). I strongly recommend that you visit that site before you
purchase a printer to work with Linux. In addition to showing supported printers, the site has a page
describing how to choose a printer for use with Linux (www.


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