Bizarre printer issue solved

Plug hp Deskjet F2480 printer/scanner in, it prints out an alignment sheet, feed it to the scanner, hit the Black Copy button & it makes a copy if it — & in the process recalibrates the print-heads a little.

But it won’t print anything.

The print job takes about as long to fail to print as it would do to succeed in printing, with no action at all in the printer, & no errors thrown either.

D’oh?

It turns out that the nearest PPD file (for the Deskjet F2200 series) is not near enough. The PC is feeding the entire document (rasterised) down the USB cable, to the printer, which simply, silently throws it away.

Using the name of the F2200 PPD file & altering it to be an F2400 PPD file, I search to discover the ferpectly correct PPD file tucked away in a package archive for some random Linux distribution... which happily includes the ability on-site to display the contents of the package & download individual files from it.

Done.

Fire up web browser, aim it at http://127.0.0.1:631/ then redefine the printer (in CUPS) with the precisely correct PPD file, & she’s all good.

Making SANE work, however, is a different story so far.

Comments

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Plantagenet Penguinista

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