Printing in FreeBSD

HP generally does seem to work, often out of the box for printing with postscript, and usually with one of the sane drivers for scanning. For several years I had a cheap inkjet that I just used for scanning and a mono B&W laser (Brother) for printing. I think they had a Linux ppd that I just copied to FreeBSD for the printing, but now I don't remember. Eventually wound up getting a color laser Samsung that had a sane driver and printer driver. (But I haven't printed in months and I may just use generic postscript--not at home right now and can't check.)
 
malavon said:
As far as I know, HP stuff. I'm not sure there are other brands that release as much OS drivers as they do. See the print/hplip port.
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Samsung releases Linux drivers and they work just fine in my experience.

One of our printers is a Xerox WorkCentre 3220 (all-in-one) B/W laser. Printing works fine because it's postscript, but the scanning is also usable because you can scan to a USB stick. Drivers may be available but I haven't bothered to look.
 
I have got a Brother. Cheap, prints beautifully, and quickly (under windows). Copied the ppd from one of the linuxes. Still does not work.

Not sure I would choose Brother again.
 
Geezer said:
I have got a Brother. Cheap, prints beautifully, and quickly (under windows). Copied the ppd from one of the linuxes. Still does not work.

Not sure I would choose Brother again.
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Your particular printer model has `BR-Script3` support? If it does it will work since that is a PostScript emulation. There are some threads explaining how to properly configure it - look for Oko posts; however IIRC the advise is to use the PPD from the Apple driver. E.g. Thread 55408/post-313979
 
Geezer said:
I have got a Brother. Cheap, prints beautifully, and quickly (under windows). Copied the ppd from one of the linuxes. Still does not work.

Not sure I would choose Brother again.
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Brother printers come with 3 levels of capability.
1) BR-script3 is Brothers version of PostScript. Since most print jobs are either text or PostScript, these printers will work in FreeBSD without any pre-processing or filtering
2) The next level down are printers that support a print/ghostscript driver like ljet4 or pxlmono (aka PCL5 or PCL6).
3) The cheapest Brother printers use a gdi driver which now has an open source driver: BRlaser. This has been ported to OpenBSD but is not yet available as a FreeBSD port. marcinkk compiled it and with the mentioned patch, reported success.
marcinkk said:
brlaser driver works ... with 600DPI setting, previously I've set 1200HQ - it does not work

edit:
it works now, the issue is described here: https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser/issues/40
changed, recompiled, reinstalled and works fine in 1200HQ too :)
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Original Thread 58656
 
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