I got very bored one evening so I decided to put this thing together. I've had it running for some time now and I guess I've seen a few questions on the newsgroups from people asking how to drive the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 550C color printer. I was one of those people once, but some kind people were able toss me a few facts that made it possible to put together a driver for the HP550C.
The HP DJ550C is a pretty decent color+black ink (CMYK) printer for the money (< US$700, if you shop around). With the best quality printing, it can do a reasonable job printing scanned color images on plain white paper. One drawback is that the ink is water soluble, so you can't get the paper wet. Otherwise the ink bleeds all over the place. The speed isn't spectacular, but with monochrome (B&W), it can put out a few pages per minute. The serial port only runs at a max of 19200 baud. (The DESKWRITER (for Macintoshes) runs at only 57600 baud, which the NeXT can't keep up with). I don't think Pantone colors can be expected of this device. Maybe. Probably not, unless someone wants to do it.
The basis of this is Ghostscript from the FSF. All of their qualifiers and licensing terms apply, i.e.:
Copyright (C) 1989, 1992, 1993 Aladdin Enterprises. All rights reserved.
Distributed by Free Software Foundation, Inc.
The original driver I used was Ghoscript 2.5.2, which did not compile easily on the NeXT. Ghostscript 2.6 is now available and has been fixed to compile on the NeXT -- with one minor glitch, but that may be fixed soon. In any case, I am including a patch.
Ghostscript is basically the FSF version of Postscript. It's kind of dumb to
run Ghostscript on the NeXT since the NeXT runs DPS anyway, but I was too lazy to hack together my own DPS drivers, etc. Even though this is a very large redundant piece of software on the NeXT, it is so easy to install that it's worth the extra disk space.
I would like to thank L. Peter Deutsch @
Aladdin Enterprises
P.O. box 60264
Palo Alto, CA 94306
voice (415)322-0103
fax (415)322-1734
...{uunet,decwrl}!aladdin!ghost
ghost@aladdin.com
who wrote Ghostscript, and licenses it commercially.
I would also like to thank John B. Lockhart (lockhart@eecom.gatech.edu) for answering my original clueless inquiries about printing on the HP550C from a NeXT, and for helping me with the printcap files. (See HP550C.printcap).
And neither last nor least, I would like to thank George Cameron (george@bio-medical-physics.aberdeen.ac.uk) who did the amazing job of writing the HP550C driver with all the nice features, including compression, CMYK support, etc. etc. etc.
I would also like to thank all the multitudes of people who will use this software and install it perfectly the first time on their machines without any glitches and who won't ask me any questions. This is a one-evening summary of what I know so that you can do it yourself. Consult your local UNIX guru. I'm supposed to be a grad student.
