I have had terrible luck trying to find a ppd that works correctly for both win9x clients and winNT/2000/XP at the same time. The CUPS method is to find one ppd that works for all and I have tried several: those at linuxprinting.org, hp's sourceforge site, vendor winNT ppds (docs suggest these), and vendor win98 ppds. I have tried filtering PJL and not filtering PJL. I have the stock ADOBEPS driver for win9x clients, the cupsdrvr driver for winNT/2000/XP clients and all works as it should except for print quality.
Most jobs go through fine, but most is not enough. Depending on the client and the print job, jobs are either printing with bad margins, bad colors, printing postscript errors, or not printing at all. I finally settled on windows 98 ppds since they seemed to work best across all of our clients, but they are not working as well as they need to be. In comparison to a windows NT server which lets you install several different drivers/ppds for any given queue, CUPS/samba does not have this ability. Some people have responded with surprise at the notion that the same printer's ppds for different OSes might not perform across different platforms, but I can assure you that this is the case. I have done diffs on HP 4000 Laserjet ppds - hp4000_4.ppd (win98), hp4000_6.ppd (winNT/2000), and hp4000_7.ppd (winXP) and they all differ greatly. The mere existence of all of these ppds should suggest that there are perhaps some non-trivial differences and that taking one and binding it with different drivers per platform would not work as planned. I can set up raw queues that use the clients' ppds, but our helpdesk and users require point-and-click printing. Does anyone have a solution or workaround for this? What happens if I have a queue that windows 98 and windows XP clients both share assuming point-and-print ability is a prerequisite? Unfortunately I am facing increasing pressure from our helpdesk and end users to go back to "that which works," which would be some kind of windows server. I see so much promise in the CUPS/Samba combo and it has given us so much from a management perspective (including accounting) that that would truly be a shame. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. cups-1.1.19 samba-2.2.8a redhat 8.0 -- Jeff Hardy System Administrator SUNY Potsdam -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
