I"m trying to make an old Okidata Microline 192 dot matrix printer work with Suse LInux 7.2 on an old Gateway PC. When I print a brief text message from Kword, the characters print bunched together and too "thick." They are barely readable but I can tell that it is what I entered. Meanwhile, the YaST test page (using driver 'oki182' at '144x144' dpi) prints correctly, as does the Windows 95 Printer test page. When I enter cat printcap >/dev/lp0 at root, I get half a page of correctly printed text about apsfilter (that is, the text is properly printed - I don't know if the apsfilter data itself is correct). If I print from KWord to a file, then cat >/dev/lp0 that file, I get two pages of apparently correctly printed Postscript data. I assume that there is some problem in the printer setup string that Kword (or Linux??) generates, but I don't know what it is or how to fix it. Also, I am relatively new at Linux so I don't understand all the various acronyms and parts of Linux. But still, if anybody has any suggestions (please be specific and detailed if possible), I would love to hear them. Thanks, in advance, for any response.

Have a look here, the news is not good I'm afraid :-(

thanks, Aussie for your response. I did look at the LinuxPrinting.org stuff but I wasn't sure if it was telling me anything new or useful, except that it only partially worked. I just thought that since the printer prints OK with a cat command there ought to be a way to make it work with KWord.

Kword (or any KDE app) work best when you use cups, you may want to give that a try.