HOLD that THOUGHT
IdeaStorm is in Read Only Mode until 10/27

Click here for details.
The Dell Community has contributed: 10385 ideas | promoted 697808 times | 80735 comments

How IdeaStorm Works:

Post Promote Discuss See
Printers and Ink Comments | Printers and Ink Ideas
160

Provide clean Postscript Drivers

160 points posted to Printers and Ink by pfismvg 07/16/08

Network printers with postscript support should have clean drivers available for download. Nowadays every printer seems to have a bloated driver with some useless per printer custom port monitor. If you have only one printer on your computer that is usually no problem, if you have a few they may allready make your system unstable. if you have lots ln your windows 2003 print server it is a nightmare.

After some digging I found that you can always use the default windows PS printer driver as long as you have a correct PPD file.

but finding the PPD files on the Dell site is a nightmare and you need to download a lot of huge files before you get everything.

I created a driver pack with the following printers (these I have on my network)
Dell 1600
Dell 1700
Dell 1720
Dell 1815
Dell 3100
Dell 5100
Dell 5110
Dell 5200
Dell 5210
Dell 5310

To find all correct files I had to download more then 200 Mb
the final version is only 2 Mb and supports XP/2003/Vista 32 and 64 bit

http://cid-5059424a2ac3e7cc.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/PrinterDrivers/CleanD...

please check the above file and start providing drivers like this for all your networked postscript printers. I know lots of System administraters will love this.

helmecj01
07/16/08		 ps can you post this on the dell community forum. http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board?board.id=A940
kevstar31
07/17/08		 this would not be a problem with cups if dell printers supported PCL since there is one cups PPD provied by pxlmono for a specific level of PCL.
http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/76077/Make_all_your_printers_support_PCL
pfismvg
07/18/08		 @helmecj01
I like a change in the availability of downloads for printer drivers, this should be the correct place

@kevstar31
this is about windows postscript drivers, not linux PCL drivers.
Personaly I dont see why you prefer PCL over Postscript. Postscript support is much better and requires far less resources in cups than PCL.
outlier
08/11/08		 I'd just like to thank pfismvg for the good work. I never did find the ppd file I needed going through the regular driver download pages, but the one he linked to above works like a champ on my 5110cn.
 
Atom feed track comments for this idea
Please log in to post a comment
recently promoted by:
recently demoted by: