So, I recently had the pleasure of setting upa printer on Windows Vista laptop. In the past I’ve always made the choice to go the ‘Generic Postscript’ driver route. This generally works, but does not allow the Windows client to adjust any of the printer settings such as color, quality, etc. With this in mind and the price of print cartridges I decided I should re-investigate the setup of the printer driver.
Searching the web quickly yields an answer: set up a ‘raw’ printer queue and the process is generally described as use the GUI tool and pick ‘Raw’ as the driver. The unfortunate part is that it generally refers to some old version of Fedora or SuSE and I’m trying to do this on an XUbuntu system.
But then again, CUPS comes with it’s own admin interface and so I gave that a shot but there was no raw driver being offered to me.
I finally found what a raw queue really is burried deep inside a very large email thread: It’s queue without an associated PPD. So I tried to cheat the system to not set a driver and failed.
Annoyed I decided to go back to basics and use a text editor.
Since the printer was already set up and serving Windows clients as a generic postscript printer, I simply copied the stanza inside the /etc/cups/printers.conf and added _raw to the end of the printer name. Then I simply didn’t create a PPD file under the /etc/cups/ppd directory and Voilá I had a working raw printer queue!
Then I finished up by setting the cheapest most economical settings and washed my hands.