I have had a Canon Pixma iP4300 for several years without being able to use it.

I've tried various versions of different drivers, of the drivers that are bundled with CUPS, I've tried Canon's proprietary drivers and I've tried Turboprint.

The latter, Turboprint does work, but I don't want to have to pay for the drivers to my own hardware, thats ridiculous. However, none of the others do, Canon's proprietary drivers don't work at all, and some of the drivers for CUPS work with very limited success -- i.e. text is misaligned, pictures look corrupted, skewed and/or with other nasty artifacts.

Has ANYONE actually been able to make this printer work properly without resorting to Turboprint?
No, I don't demand full resolution; no, I don't demand all the fancy features that are available with the Vole Windows drivers -- I merely want to be able to print documents at a somewhat reasonable resolution, and sometimes a picture, with mediocre resolution/quality.

Well, according to OpenPrinting, some people have had minor success with it.

It's not clear from your post whether you've tried this already. If you can't get the same drivers to work then you're probably out of luck. Canon is one of the least linux-friendly peripheral makers out there, and what OpenPrinting shows is probably the best you're going to get. Your best bet really is to simply ebay the sucker and go get something with better support.

When I try with the recommended "canonip4300.ppd" I got an error that some "cnijfilter"-thing is missing, I installed it (converted from .rpm to .deb), then the error went away, and nothing at all happens instead.

When I select "Print Test Page" (which prints a test page which is corrupted with other drivers from CUPS) nothing at all happens, "Job sent", but no action at all on the printer, and no warning, error and/or other information ...

I don't know if this recipe is applicable to the IP4300. I have the (also unsupported) IP3000. I found a printer that's "close" in driver needs which is called s400. I found this by printing with that driver and getting some output except that the output is too small; the driver spits out dots for what it thinks that "s400" printer's resolution is (360x360). The IP3000 has 600x600, so the output is scaled down by 0.6.

On my system is a compressed text file
/usr/share/ppd/Canon/Canon-S400-s400a1.upp.ppd.gz
which references s400a1.upp, as well as the printer name, in several places.

The corresponding upp file is
/usr/share/ghostscript/8.15/lib/s400a1.upp

(both files are part of a package called ghostscript-esp on my gentoo systems).

I made new versions and called them ip3000.upp.ppd.gz and ip3000.upp, changing the strings in the former accordingly. In the upp, I simply changed the dpi values. There is a line that says "-r360x360", I made this -r600x600.

Now the cups test page and most documents print fine, although there are some graphics (especially if you print from pdf) which still come out garbled. I think it has to do with a too high color depth.

I don't know how portable this is to other IPxxxx printers. See if maybe the above just works, else go through some predefined printer drivers and see if you can get any printout at all. Then try to follow the steps, adjusting the dpi etc to match your printer's.

Good luck,
mlp

I have a IP4300 and have used the Gutenprint drivers and the Canon drivers.

I use Opensuse 10.3 and Cups.

The Canon driver comes in two rpm files cnijfilter-common-2.70-1.i386.rpm and cnijfilter-ip4300-2.70-2.rpm. Available on the Canon Australia download site. You need to install both of them. On Opensuse they get installed to /usr/share/cups/models/canonip4300.ppd and so are not easily picked up by KDE Cups config wizard. Move the canonip4300.ppd to /usr/share/cups/models/canon/canonip4300.ppd to make life easier

These work fine for undemanding printing and I am actually quite pleased with the printer after many years of Epson Stylus printing.

Good luck