2011-11-12
Playing copier
For the first time since we acquired a HP scanjet 3970 I tried to use it as a copier to avoid walking over to the supermarket and use the (bad) copiers there. The 'copy' mode in xsane resulted in nothing happening with the laserjet 4050 printer. Next thing I tried was scanning to a .png and printing that from the gimp, but the result was that the printer was still processing the print job after more than an hour. The solution was to install gimp-gutenprint. First I tried printing to the Epson Color 760 which printed instantly but took a while to finish the page. I had a look in the available drivers and gimp-gutenprint has native support for the HP laserjet 4050. Using this driver resulted in something in the right resolution coming out of the printer within half a minute of submitting the print job. I remembered from earlier attempts that configuring gimp-gutenprint might be a lot of work but since it was all configured in the home directories it still knew the right setup and it was easy to get working again.