Adapting CUPS to a strange printer

[sonofwatt]

Hey Guys,
I have a tricky situation. I live and work in Japan, and just got my hands on a really cheap laser printer. Its a Ricoh IPSiO NX71, which was sold only in Japan. And its a member of the RPDL (Like PS or PCL) family of printers, which were only sold in Japan. Getting good drivers for it is hard, but there are functional ones for Linux, not Mac. Right now I can print in Linux, but not OS X. I want to get it working in OS X.

There are a few ways I could do this:
1. Setup a linux print server, that renders the Postscript from the client with its own version of ghostscript, thus requiring no drivers as it would act like a Postscript Printer. I wouldn't how to this, but if suggested I can ask else where. I think it would be cool because it would be driver unspecific. If such a print server doesn't exsist, I think it should.

2. Make OS X CUPS work with the Linux ppd file I have. (This would require installing a newer version of ESP Ghostscript and Foomatic-RIP and making that work is OS X CUPS)

3. Modify the Linux PPD to work with OS X. I don't know how to do that. From quickly browsing the file, it seems to leave at lot of work to Foomatic-RIP.

Are these do-able? What do you think? I know its a little strange. But it seems like a good project to me. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[gsahli]

#2 looks doable to me.

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/macosx
(you knew about this site, right? - go to the Printers button in light Blue near the top to read about Ricoh RPDL)

[sonofwatt]

Yeah, #2 did work. Found a binary for Foomatic-RIP, and compiled the newest version Ghostscript-esp manually and it now works just as good as my linux box. Now, if only I had a better ppd, I could get higher resoultions out of the thing, but for now its OK!