PSPrinter for OS X

Paul Forbes

Paul Forbes

Registered
Hi All, Does anyone know if the Adobe PS Printer is available for OS X?
Also, on a side line, is it possible to edit printer drivers?
Ta!
- Paul
 
Do you mean postscript printers?

Postscript printers have PPD's (Postscript Printer Description) and they can be opened in a text editor. They are pretty straight forward and it's easy to do a little bit of editing.

What kind of editing you had in mind? I edited PPD for Xerox DC2240 because the tray selection didn't work. Now it does...
 
Hi Skoggis,
Yes I mean postscript printers. The problem is this: We have Canon copiers with Fiery's RIP's connected. In OS 9 the printer driver allowed us to send notes to the Fiery which appeared in the job log. Now in OS X, the drivers don't have these notes pages. Canon haven't done anything about it yet but we need this function. The problem could be related to the fact that in OS 9 we could used PSPrinter (instead of Laserwriter 8) in the Chooser, and this allowed notes to be sent to the RIP. Any ideas?
 
I did some investigating when we got our Xerox and it seems that the print core of MacOS X is not that good.

I compared Xerox's ppd's for 9 and X and they were exactly the same. And that's the whole idea of ppd's, to have a file that works on any platform. Unfortunately MacOS X's print core doesn't support all the functions that ppd can have. For example the tray switching I was talking about. It didn't work on x but worked fine under 9. I wrote some code under the paper size in the ppd (shows up in page setup) and now I can select paper tray from page setup dialog. You can read the PostScript Printer Description File Format Specification here:

http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5003.PPD_Spec_v4.3.pdf

Are you using the ppd for your Canon or some generic ppd? You can use "os 9" ppd's in os x because they're the same. Just drop them to /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj. They don't need to be in .gz format, just drop the .PPD file in there and it should show up in your print center when you add new printers.

Hope this helps. Keep asking for more 'til we figure this out:D
 
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