Foomatic package download

In the olden days, every printer driver was a separate ghostscript device. This meant you had to recompile ghostscript for every new printer driver. A newer method is to have a common ghostscript device call an external program also called a filter; distinct from CUPS filters , which controls the printer options for the different models supported by the filter. This means you do not need to recompile ghostscript every time a new printer model comes out; you just update the external filter program.

One of these external ghostscript filters is "hpijs". It can be used in tandem with either the oldish "hpijs" ghostscript device or the new "ijs" ghostscript device. Foomatic PPDs for the hpijs ghostscript filter are provided by the hpijs-ppds package and will already be installed and available for selection in the CUPS web interface if you installed that package. Other Foomatic PPDs need to be downloaded from the www. In addition, if I want to use a Foomatic PPD, the Foomatic PPD for hpijs for this printer was already installed by the hpijs-ppds package, so I can use the hpijs driver the recommended driver for this printer, as we shall see right away.

Go to www. I choose the HP DeskJet , which takes me to this page. As you can see, there are many drivers to choose from for my printer: hpijs, cdj, hpdj, pcl3, stp, hpijs-rss, gimp-print, and gimp-print-ijs. We can quickly discard three of these: stp is the old 'traditional' ghostscript device from the Gimp-Print distribution; gimp-print is the new "stp" ghostscript device; gimp-print-ijs is the external ghostscript filter from the Gimp-Print distribution that uses the "ijs" ghostscript device.

We're not going to use any of these: if we want a Gimp-Print driver, we'll use the native CUPS filters provided by the gimp-print-cups package. We can also discard hpijs-rss as an older, albeit patched, version of hpijs than the one we have installed, and hpdj as an older version of the pcl3 driver. This leaves us with three choices: hpijs, cdj, and pcl3. The page says that the type of the cdj driver is "Ghostscript".

This means that you need to have the "cdj" device compiled into ghostscript if you want to use the cdj PPD. To find out what devices were compiled into ghostscript, examine the output of the gs -h command the " g host s cript" command executed with the " h elp" switch.

You may want to pipe the output through "less" for easier reading gs -h less. Lucky for us, "cdj" is listed, so we can use this PPD. The astute will have spotted the "pcl3" device, the "ijs" device, which is used by the hpijs ghostscript filter, and the "cups" device, which is used by the native CUPS filters, among the available devices.

Click the "download PPD" link. If your browser has trouble setting a reasonable filename for the PPD, you can rename it after downloading to the name suggested in the PPD.

You will also need one or more database packages. The foomatic-db package includes drivers for most common printers using Ghostscript as the print processor, as well as some common glue code used in other filter systems. This page is also available in the following languages How to set the default document language :.

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