Introductory Notes

What to Expect/Limitations

These instructions should get basic printing to work for you using any printer supported by GhostScript. These instructions only show you how to make work a single output resolution with no color/black-and-white selection options. But don’t worry; with the learning experience and some other pearls of wisdom imparted here, you’ll be able to do that yourself.

In a short while, you’ll have to decide whether you’ll be using an IP printer as the “real” printer, an AppleTalk printer as the “real” printer, or an SMB (Windows-shared) printer as the “real” printer. In general, I’ve had better results using the AppleTalk option, and if your printer or print-server is capable of AppleTalk, I recommend it to you, too. Nay-sayers will claim that AppleTalk is slow, but don’t worry about that - your printer is probably a lot slower than a “slow” AppleTalk connection (especially if the printer is an inkjet).

If you decide to use IP as your “real” printer, then there are some other minor inconveniences that I’ve detected. On my iMac the whole LPD system will come to a sudden stop after I log out of my user account and put the machine to sleep. This means that after waking the machine up and logging into an account, the network printer will no longer print. The Mac OS X Print Center will not complain, and everything will seem well. However the system error log (use the Console application to view it) will claim that your printer was not found. When you restart the computer and print another job, the LPD gets reset, and all of the stalled jobs (everything you tried to print but didn’t get printed) will also be printed. Since nothing ever actually gets “lost” (and I don’t brag about my system uptime), this isn't a real tragedy. AppleTalk users are affected by this, too, but they have a workaround until the next restart.