[Zim]

What's the deal on printer drivers? I finally decided to see if I
could print under OSX and found that it knows (via some USB
signalling??) that I have a BJC-3000 (purchased last summer), but
does not allow me to pick any driver for it.

Am I supposed to be waiting for a driver from Canon? or what's the
deal?

Printless in X,
Mike

Same thing for me.
I have a BJC-6200.
Is there any way to play with the S family printers.
I'm so sad being unable to use my nice little printer.

Have a nice CyberDay
Xavier

[Richyfp]

I'm surprised that there have been so few threads on the matter of printer drivers lately.

I AM ENRAGED (well, not really enraged, but pretty annoyed) by the lack of drivers for my printer (an Epson Stylus Photo 1200). The OS has been released for over 3 weeks! Epson managed to get a number of drivers into the release and then for over 3 weeks what have they been doing???? Nothing, by the looks of it.

How long can it possibly take to write a printer driver when you've been doing it for god knows how many years?? I would imagine about a day per printer at the maximum, especially when there's already some there that can just be adapted.

Is there even any mention of Mac OS X on Epson's website?? I couldn't find one. They haven't even gone to the trouble of posting the drivers that Apple included wiht the OS. I just can't believe the crap support that they have provided in this respect.

Epson: unless you come up with something pretty quick, my next printer will be an HP.

How long can it possibly take to write a printer driver when you've been doing it for god knows how many years?? I would imagine about a day per printer at the maximum, especially when there's already some there that can just be adapted.

I would imagine

Well, let's think this through a little. Look around the forums. See all those posts about crashing systems? How long do you think it takes to do development with a crashing system? What about QA? It may take you 30 seconds to write a post, but for a manufacturer that's providing a working product, it's going to take a few weeks to go back and forth with Apple sorting through a NEW os, learning the insides of it, determining what's broken on Apple's end that Apple needs to fix, and what's broken on Epson's end that Epson needs to fix. There's a lot of work here. It's amazing what's supported out of the box.

What about Lexmark printer drivers, they made software for Mac OS 9 what about Mac OS X?... Hmmm... Anyone know if they will make drivers, or if Apple will make drivers that work with that printer?

[Zim]

I guess I had no need to print, but figured from the relative
quietness of things that there would be no big deal.

Damn was I wrong.

:-(

Mike

[starman]

Well, I wrote a nice, long, detailed message and then IE died on me. Grrr (and don't tell me to use Omni, it crashes on me more then IE does).

That said, here's what I wrote in a nutshell:

Printing under OS X is totally different than under OS 9. Just because you had a driver working under 9 doesn't mean you can just snap your fingers and do it under X. First off, X used PDF as the basis for printing, 9 (and earlier) used QuickDraw objects, so you can see how completely different the two of them are.

I've been working on a PCL5 driver and so far everything's going great. I have a tech support incident at Apple because of a possible problem with data corruption under Appletalk, but besides that I can print very well. Then again, it's only been a few days that the driver's been running so who knows what quirks I might run into.

Give the companies time. Printing isn't that bad, but they might have to rewrite parts of their core to get it to work under X, and Apple has yet to publically release any documentation with respect to printer drivers (even though sample code is on the developer CD, it's not enough). If anyone knows of any, let me know! Three weeks ago I finished preliminary work on a MacOS 9 driver and let me tell you - the difference between a 9 driver and a X driver are like night and day. I prefer the X way of doing things.

Mike

[Richyfp]

OK, OK, I admit, my post was a bit over the top.
(Sorry for the long post that follows... a summary of why I think Epson should have drivers out already is found at the bottom)

I really don't know much about programming a printer driver (this was probably obvious from my last post!). However, Epson already have their printer utility program working on Mac OS X and have several drivers working as well. I would have thought that they would not start every new driver from scratch, but instead copy an old one and add code to match the facilities available on the printer. i.e. I would hope that their drivers talk to all of their printers in similar ways and so, once several drivers are working, only small modifications need to be made to them to support other printers.

If the above is wrong, please correct me. But I think to myself, if Epson employed one programmer to make the new drivers, working 9 'til 5 on weekdays, from the release of OS X until now, they would have had over 100 hours to complete the drivers. I am sure that they have more than one person writing drivers, and also, they already have drivers available that could simply be adapted (I think).

To anonymous:

...but for a manufacturer that's providing a working product, it's going to take a few weeks to go back and forth with Apple sorting through a NEW os, learning the insides of it

Surely they've already learned the insides of it. Otherwise, how have they managed to get 11 working printer drivers onto the CD that the OS came on??

It may take you 30 seconds to write a post...

I know that my previous post sounded a bit harsh towards Epson. I'm sorry for that. But I paid �350 for my printer (about $550 USA) and it doesn't work with Mac OS X!

Epson don't mention Mac OS X at all on their website and haven't even posted any 'beta' drivers. I would really appreciate it if they did post beta drivers. This would mean that the QA time that you talk about would not be an issue, because they could clearly label the drivers with Beta and people could download them at their own risk. It would also mean that bugs are reported very quickly, instead of having a bloke sitting at Epson testing every possible combination of hardware, software, firmware etc.

Also, I think that now we are using an OS with an open source core, the manufacturers who work with it might want to consider open sourcing their code. I feel that this especially applies to priter manufacturers, who could reap the benefits of the open source community. These benefits would then be passed onto their customers.

To starman:
Thank you for your post! I do realise that it must be hard writing a printer driver from scratch. You should probably read the summary below to find out why I can't understand why Epson don't have any drivers out yet. Also, as you have experience in writing printer drivers, once you have a driver working, is it possible to simply adapt it so that it works with another, similar printer (perhaps with different paper size, number of inks, a duplex unit, etc...)?

Summary of why Epson should have drivers for the majority of their printers out now:
a)they already have drivers for 11 printers that work in Mac OS X
b)they already have their Utility application ported
c)Mac OS X does actually recognise the printer through USB, there just aren't any drivers to actually print to it
d)they have had 3 weeks (plus all the time when the Beta was out- were they doing anything then?) and still I don't even see any beta drivers for my printer
e)I'm sure that Apple would send them a couple of engineers to lend a hand if they wanted
f)It seems that Epson can't even be bothered to acknowledge Mac OS X's exstence on their web site. If the drivers aren't coming, I want to know.
g)Epson have a long history of creating printers and printer drivers and so I would expect them to be very experienced (i.e. it shouldn't take them that long to get the hang of it in Mac OS X)

If anyone does know where I can find out how to write my own printer driver, please let me know, so I can get started.

Sorry for the long post!

[starman]

One other reason why we might not have drivers:

I'm fighting a bug in the Printer Manager code right now. A big one. There's a way to set up a list of options that the printer can handle, but when you read the list back, it comes back corrupted. I already sent in a bug report to Apple, but I'm still playing with the insides of the memory trying to figure out if it's an offset header or something wacky. So far, nothing. I already said that I have a working PCL5 core, but the problem is that I can't go ahead with the GUI until this problem is solved since the build of the GUI depends on the data from this list. Also, the Appletalk data corruption issue is really starting to piss me off. I even got Apple's LaserWriter driver to fail this morning, so I know it's not just me or my code. Could be our network. Could be a bug in OS X. Could be a lot of things...


Ta!

Mike

[Zim]

I'd be more generous if this had been beta #2 and $39.95.

But at $129, I think customers should be able to have a functional OS.

No, I've never written a print driver, but it makes me wonder that if
some drivers for certain models from a company exist, how far behind
can the others be? (maybe that's unfair, but...)

Couple this with the fact that my Classic won't boot from X :-)
and right now I don't feel like fighting to fix that (I just
system switch and reboot).

Mike

I hope Apple will include some Lexmark printer drivers for Mac OS X. Lemark already has a line of printers that comes with drivers that work perfect under Mac OS 9. MacMall offers lots of iMac deals that come with free Lexmark printers as part of the package. Now what iff people upgrade to Mac OS X and find out their Lexmark printer doesn't work, like me. Well that's not good. Crossing my fingers