[COLUG] duplex postscript laser printer

[Dave]

On Apr 5, 2008, at 1:56 PM, Vincent Herried wrote:

> On Saturday 05 April 2008 12:31:37 pm Rob Funk wrote:
>>> What I'm not clear on is how you specify the duplex option when
>>> printing from firefox. Does anyone have experience with this and can
>>> tell me if there will be an option there or if I can just tell the
>>> printer to always do duplex?
>
> OK, I looked.. do a google search to see if you can find the
> driver for this printer.  the ppd
>
> grab a copy of the cups DDK tools.  It can massage the windoz ppd.
> Then when you are satisfied that you can build a proper ppd for linux
> buy it.
>
> fyi, my printer is a GCC and I got a bunch of errors trying to  
> convert it for
> use with linux.  I just deleted the offending lines and let it rip.
> while my printer does have the duplex feature installed, the ppd I  
> have
> supports it.  I may be simplifying this, tho.  My printer has a http  
> interface
> that allows me to massage all its options that way in addition to   
> supporting
> the ppd options via cups parms.

I'm finally getting around to this. My wife's office picked up the  
printer (HP Laser Jet P2015d) and I stopped over Saturday hoping I  
could get it to work for duplex printing fairly easily. I tried  
installing a new version of hplip among other things but didn't get it  
to work. It was printing single pages ok (other than margins were a  
bit off - not certain if some of the things I did caused that or not).  
So I gave up and took it home and hooked up to my Mac OS X machine and  
used the Mac/Windows CD that came with it and it of course works fine  
printing duplex.

So I used the locate command and found the file:
-rw-rw-r--  1 root  admin  46466 Sep 27  2007 /Library/Printers/PPDs/ 
Contents/Resources/HP LaserJet P2015.gz

According to my Time Machine backups on the Mac, that file was already  
there (this is 10.5)

So I checked the Linux machines (CentOS 5) and don't find that file.  
Here is the closest thing:

/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/PPD/HP/mono_laser/ 
HP_LaserJet_2100_Series.ppd.gz

So my question is: if I copy "HP LaserJet P2015.gz" file from my Mac  
to that directory on the Linux machine (and presumable change the  
spaces to underscores), will that make it work? Using the printer  
configuration tool on CentOS, I added an option for Sides and set it  
to 2, but that didn't work (but of course I didn't have the this ppd  
file then). Is there anything else I need to do for the CentOS printer  
configuration to find that file as an option for the driver?

Looking through that ppd file for lines containing duplex, I found:
*DefaultHPOption_Duplexer: False

Should I just change that to True and it will always print in duplex?  
There are lots of other lines containing duplex (too many to post),  
but if one of the other lines is the appropriate one to change, I  
could obviously do that.

Thanks,
Dave