Re: [Sheflug] New HP Deskjet 3940 printer

[Peter Humphrey <prh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 27 Jan 2007, J Simpson V21 wrote:

> It prints a few strange characters and feedsout several empty pages.

Sounds like one of two things, depending on what the strange characters are. 
Either you're sending postscript to it (the first character will be a 
per-cent, and you'll see line-feeds without carriage-returns until the line 
goes off the right side of the page), in which case you need to include 
something like enscript, or raw data are being sent instead of, say, PCL.

You didn't say which distribution you have installed; most of them have 
printer management tools, much the easiest of which to use is cups. If you 
have that installed, you can use your Web browser to manage the printer by 
pointing it to http://localhost:631 and giving root's password. Make sure 
the printer's connected and alive first. Then you should be able to 
navigate through the browser to set it up. Have you followed the 
instructions at 
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/Database/CUPSDocumentation? 
Or the trouble-shooting guide? The database at 
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-DeskJet_3940 says 
your printer "works mostly" and that you should have hpijs installed.

Did you get a .ppd file with the printer? If so you may need to copy it to 
your printer-definition database, which on my box is 
under /usr/share/foomatic/db/source/PPD/Kyocera/en/ from which you can see 
that I have foomatic installed as well. (I'm not sure whether that's 
entirely necessary, but as my setup just works I've not much incentive to 
find out.) I wouldn't do that though until you've exhausted the 
straightforward route.

Come back again if that's not enough...

-- 
Rgds
Peter

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