Cups has just gone up to 1.4.8, which with the new kernel is now recognising my HP Laserjet P1102 better. Now the printing is scale is even more oversize, with test page margins off the edge of the a4 paper.
I noticed that hplip is still the ancient 3.11.3a, which is perhaps too old for recent cups?

Just to make sure... Did your printer work with the previous version of cups?
I'm not near to it, but I installed a p1102 at a friend just a few weeks ago (Slackware 13.37-stable) and needed an external driver.

At home I needed the newer hplip, but that was not for the p1102 but a completely different HP Laser that was not recognized by the 3.11.3 version.

The P1102 does not work with hplip for me, neither. It does work, however, with the foo2zjs driver.

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Yes, that's the driver I also needed. Hence the question if it worked before.

Thanks, that reminded me and I had used foo2zjs before, but with my printer pretending to be a 1020.
I fetched the most recent foo2zjs bundle (why no versioning?) and things are a bit better. The test print margins are back.

Is foomatic involved here too? I think the more recent hplip may work without foo2zjs

I did not actually test this, but AFAIK the newest hplip does not solve the problem of the foo2zjs printers and you will still need that driver.
Not a big deal I think, just a small extra hassle when installing, but it works quite well afterwards.

current version from HP is hplip-3.11.12 and it is easy to upgrade using Slackware's hplip.slackbuild. The p1102 has been supported for awhile. Don't forget to download the required plugin with hp-setup as root. Also, sometimes you have to try different recommended CUPS drivers. For example, hpijs works best for my printers instead of gutenprint/hpcups.

edit: just took a look at the foo2xjs driver. HP does not mention it on the hplip pages. I don"t have any ZjStream protocol printers; everything here is PCL and/or Postscript and are not win/GDI (ie offload image processing to the driver CPU).

The official hplip just jumped to 3.11.12, so I just upgraded to that and ran hp-setup. This fetched a plugin from hp and created a new printer in CUPS. This seems to behave even better than the zjs version.

yes, I noticed as well. I already had 3.11.12 running here, as it indeed works better with some newer printers.

Actually there's a newer version of hplip and it supports more printers version, but i guess it's in pending for inclusion in -Current

I guess that eventually it will be included in -current, if it offers interesting new features / printers / solutions for bugs...
I'll actually test it, as I have a silly problem with my HP Color Laser printer I reported upstream. Maybe they even solved it

Take a look at the cups changelog as well. This has moved on to 1.5.2 vs 1.4.8 in current, fixing several bugs.
Ghostcript is another culprit for printing problems, as a recent fix deals with a rotated page error.