Printing and Scanning on the OS/2 Platform by Tony Butka

Remember I said I'd talk about laser printers? OK, lets go, with a couple of exceptions for other printer/driver issues.

Two general notes:

• First, if you have printer drivers all over your desktop and want to stop the madness and uninstall (really uninstall) all of the darn things, then try a utility called prndrv.exe, available at http://www.cds-inc.com/techsprt/pmfaxodl.html
• Second, if you are having problems with your printer being really really slow, you might make sure that you are using bidirectional print drivers. Check out http://www.os2site.com/sw/drivers/parallel/bidi.exe

The "Other" Printers

I know that readers use printers other than Epson and Lexmark, really I do. So here's news about some of them. First, Chris Stumpf reports good success with the Canon i850 printer using USB and the Omni drivers. Its inexpensive, and the only real limitation seems to be that you have only draft and normal modes available, not photo high quality mode. Still, Chris is jazzed, and replacement cartridges are inexpensive ($11 -16) and readily available at Fry's. A couple of other Canon questions I've seen reveal that there are a number of printer specific drivers available, as well as the generic Omni drivers. For all this stuff, try the device driver pak online at http://www7.software.ibm.com/2bcprod.nsf/WebCat?OpenView to see if your favorite is listed.

Matthew Walsh reports great success with the Minolta-QMS2350 network printer (postscript). He also notes that PCL6 is working and SLPR drivers as well. Thanks, Matthew! And for the Panasonic fans, Leszek Kubrak reports in from Poland that he is using a Panasonic KX-P7105 duplex printer, and it works just fine with the HP LJ2200 drivers. Howard Winter, who uses the same printer, has had success with the IBM Network Printer 17 driver in a networked environment in PCL mode, but that driver evidently doesn't like duplexing.

HP

Even though they dumped OS/2 support, a lot of folks still use HP (including yours truly at work). John Urbaniak actually got through to a live HP Technical Support person - way to go, John - and they seem to think that the HP1200 driver should work OK with the Laserjet 1300. Also, Steve reports that he is using an HP3300 series printer just fine with the latest laserjet driver. Note that the printer is not directly listed - you should use the 3200 settings. There are also anecdotal reports that the HP Deskjet 990C drivers will work with the HP 5550 color printer. You can get the 990C drivers from the device driver pak site listed above. Please let me know if they work for you and I'll share the information with everyone else.

And just out of curiosity, has anyone been able to get an OfficeJet to work under OS/2? I know that there are some PCL3 drivers out there - eCS ships with them, but so far I haven't heard of anyone actually using them with an OfficeJet.

Lexmark

Some folks have been looking for Z31 drivers. Try this site - http://www.dreamlandbbs.com/files/gfd/sysprnt/ - which also has laser, Omni, postscript and some other goodies.

Another good source for Lexmark drivers is http://www1.vobis.de/bbs/support/brett57/.

Innotek

Just to finish this month's column, you should run and get Innotek's refresh of the Acrobat Reader 4.05. First, it's quicker to load - much. Second, and I verified this at Warpstock last month, Innotek's been doing some serious work on the creaky old OS/2 printer subsystem. They have also been doing a lot of this work with Lexmark printers. Anyhow, the new release has cleaned up metafile spooling to use raw data; in plain terms this means faster, better, higher quality printing. Also the postscript will do a quick pass through for direct printing; also faster, better, higher quality printing.

Oh, and be sure to check out Gary Wong's news about this version of Acrobat Reader in his Download! column this month.

That's all for now. See you next month! Feel free to contact me at Tony@scoug.com.

By day, Tony Butka is a bureaucrat for Los Angeles County. In his other life he lives in a loft surrounded by computers, printers, and a host of vinyl records.

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