Epson 740 drivers?

Status
Not open for further replies.
According to an article in yesterday's Macweek.com, (http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/09/10/0915osxprinters.html)Epson and Canon have no plans to give us Mac OS X drivers until the final (gold) version ships. HP is not talking. Keep a look out there for further info.
 
I have a 670, so needless to say I've been thinking about this a lot the past day. ...

And what I came up with is this: If you listen to some people, there are more Linux/BSD-type folks than there are Mac folks. (I'm not looking to start a flame war here; just hear me out. :)) Well, I can't imagine a horde of *nixers completely without printers any more than I can imagine them all having $1000+ laser printers and running Ghostscript. The point is, they have to have hacked up some drivers, no?

So why don't we _use_ the BSD layer of OS X to compile us up some printer drivers? Hell, why not any drivers we may need? I'd love to set my CD-RW to burnin' under X Beta already ... ;)

Anyone know how feasible this is?
 
I am only superficially familiar with the BSD side of OSX. Is this possible to run a true postscript spooler in the BSD layer communicating with classic apps as well as carbon apps? If so, I would reaaaalllly be interested in any solution to this.
 
Of course, you do all realise that you *can't* use the BSD layer to print. The printing in OSX requires drivers that interact with high level printing APIs in the layers *above* the BSD layer.

Of course, this isn't to say that you might be able to make an OpenStep(?) level print driver that interacts with a BSD layer printdriver. Even at that level, I don't imagine it is just a simple port away, but I can't be sure about that, as I am not that familiar with the use of BSD print drivers.

The point? As much as we all hope to have print drivers sooner, it will require a good programmer to make any. If they did, they would probably be best off avoiding BSD level stuff altogether, and stealing open sourced stuff in making OpenStep level drivers.

Oh, did I mention that non high paying ADC members won't be able to get the dev tools for OSX beta for another month or more?
 
Of course, you do all realise that you *can't* use the BSD layer to print. The printing in OSX requires drivers that interact with high level printing APIs in the layers *above* the BSD layer.

Of course, this isn't to say that you might be able to make an OpenStep(?) level print driver that interacts with a BSD layer printdriver. Even at that level, I don't imagine it is just a simple port away, but I can't be sure about that, as I am not that familiar with the use of BSD print drivers.

The point? As much as we all hope to have print drivers sooner, it will require a good programmer to make any. If they did, they would probably be best off avoiding BSD level stuff altogether, and stealing open sourced stuff in making OpenStep level drivers.

Oh, did I mention that non high paying ADC members won't be able to get the dev tools for OSX beta for another month or more?
 
All hardware accessing drivers can't just simply be recompiled from *bsds. Drivers for Mac OS X must be rewritten with Apple's IOKit SDK.
 
Seems like in the Classic environment, USB is the bottleneck. Almost none of my USB stuff functions.

If that's true, classic programs could use classic drivers, once USB functions in the classic environment.

Is that right?

If it is, howcome my mouse and keyboard are working???
 
USB printing in Classic does not work either. There appears to be fundamental USB parts missing. Printing through Appletalk to a postscript printer does work in both Classic and X...
 
Now, I'm wondering if you can't set up some driver that works through ghostscript (once it gets working) to print to one of the Epsons ... might be worth a shot. The idea is that you can print a ps or pdf file through ghostscript and then onto a printer.

Might be an interesting idea, until the printer companies get their collective butts in gear and release some drivers.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top