HP laser printer - colour problem - VERY confused
 

First things first, I suppose? I have an HP Color LaserJet 1600 and openSUSE 11.2 with kernel version 2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop and KDE 4.

Note also, I'd had this problem before under openSUSE 10.3 but what I've tried fixed it then.

I'm having ENORMOUS trouble printing colour. First, because I like to use FOSS, I tried with foo2hp/foo2zjs. It printed fine in greyscale but refused to print in colour at all. I discovered that my version of GhostScript was known to be incompatible with foo2hp colour printing, but I couldn't seem to get hold of a working version.

So on to HPLIP. Using that I can somewhat print colour, but not reliably. The HP test page has a colour wheel that works fine, but little else seems to get through; the exception is if I specify 2BPP. Unfortunately, using 2BPP produces hideously distorted results (which in some cases is still better than nothing at all).

I've fiddled around with lots of settings, including different ICM profiles and whatnot. Curiously, I've also found that specifying glossy media in greyscale mode results in a completely blank output.

I'm at my wit's end! Printing has never been my forte and this is simply overwhelming me. I've no idea what logs to look at or anything.

Any help much appreciated for this poor, confused duck out of water.

my printing experience is chequered, but experience tells me that most things with foo in them have long learning/sorting curves.

Have you tried cups/gimp print? BTW, ghostscript not handling your printer is fatal - I think everything uses it. There is even a printing from scratch doc that uses it exclusively. There are 2 versions of ghostscript offering different versions also

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hint.../files/pfs.txt

Thank you for reminding me about cups. I did try it, but the drivers it wanted to use before installing foo2hp were completely ineffective. Is there some other way I should try to use it?

Printing from Gimp has the same problems as all other applications, unfortunately. It seems to be very much a driver issue.

Since Ghostscript is so important, which is not hard to believe, could I be so bold as to request some help in finding a working version? I know that version 8.64 doesn't work (according to a post on foo2hp forums, see below). Apparently, versions before or after should do, but I have somehow been unable to find them!

http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/forum/read.php?63,1813

Edit: Have found ghostscript 8.70. Am trying to compile now.

Edit2: It compiled/installed... but doesn't seem to be working. Presumably I need to move/link some things.

Installed GH 8.70 from source

Also had to install 8.64 from repository, otherwise nothing worked for some reason.

Set up cups using the foo2zjs PPD file.

Doing that... it works!

So I guess this should've gone into software rather than hardware. Nonetheless, problem solved.

I would suggest uninstall 8.64 and reinstall 8.7. a simple make install in the directory will do that if you haven't cleaned up. If you didn't put a prefix in the configure, it's now in /usr/local

Then try gs -h, and you'll see all the native drivers. Try with whatever looks close, and you have examples in the /usr/../share/ghostscript/<version>/examples directory. doretree.ps and colorcir are colour. The pfs.txt I referenced gives you the detailed commands.

Thanks, business_kid. foo2xjs, its drivers, Ghostscript 8.7 etc all fully installed... and the colour printing sort of works, but the quality is poor. For the time being I've been forced to conclude that I should use Windows for this printer, until I can afford to buy another with better Linux support.

Thanks, again, for your help.