I have had terrible luck trying to find a ppd that works correctly for
both win9x clients and winNT/2000/XP at the same time. The CUPS method is
to find one ppd that works for all and I have tried several: those at
linuxprinting.org, hp's sourceforge site, vendor winNT ppds (docs suggest
these), and vendor win98 ppds. I have tried filtering PJL and not
filtering PJL. I have the stock ADOBEPS driver for win9x clients, the
cupsdrvr driver for winNT/2000/XP clients and all works as it should
except for print quality.
Most jobs go through fine, but most is not enough. Depending on the
client and the print job, jobs are either printing with bad margins, bad
colors, printing postscript errors, or not printing at all. I finally
settled on windows 98 ppds since they seemed to work best across all of
our clients, but they are not working as well as they need to be.
In comparison to a windows NT server which lets you install several
different drivers/ppds for any given queue, CUPS/samba does not have this
ability. Some people have responded with surprise at the notion that the
same printer's ppds for different OSes might not perform across different
platforms, but I can assure you that this is the case. I have done diffs
on HP 4000 Laserjet ppds - hp4000_4.ppd (win98), hp4000_6.ppd
(winNT/2000), and hp4000_7.ppd (winXP) and they all differ greatly. The
mere existence of all of these ppds should suggest that there are perhaps
some non-trivial differences and that taking one and binding it with
different drivers per platform would not work as planned. I can set up
raw queues that use the clients' ppds, but our helpdesk and users require
point-and-click printing. Does anyone have a solution or workaround for
this? What happens if I have a queue that windows 98 and windows XP
clients both share assuming point-and-print ability is a prerequisite?
Unfortunately I am facing increasing pressure from our helpdesk and end
users to go back to "that which works," which would be some kind of
windows server. I see so much promise in the CUPS/Samba combo and it has
given us so much from a management perspective (including accounting) that
that would truly be a shame. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
cups-1.1.19
samba-2.2.8a
redhat 8.0
--
Jeff Hardy
System Administrator
SUNY Potsdam
