#Amiga Printing: HELP!
9 messages in this thread
Can anyone offer any tips on printing from the Amiga? Until recently, I've
never even had a printer hooked up to my 4000, and have done all my printing by
transferring everything over to the PC. Now that I've hooked up an HP DeskJet
550C to the 4000, I'm *still* having to print everything on the PC!
Here's what I've tried:
Found an Amiga driver for the 550C, and installed it in the drawer with all the
other printer drivers…
Went to the PREFS drawer, selected PRINTER, chose the 550C driver, selected
PRINTER GFX, plus the other 2 configurable printer-related icons, and set
everything up the way I wanted it…
Go to the TOOLS drawer, and double-click 'InitPrinter', then 'GraphicDump'…
Also tried "Print Area" from ImageMaster…
THE RESULTS: Page after page of sheets with nothing but a line of two of
unreadable garbage; continues until the printer is turned off…
Hints and tips, anyone?
Many thanks!
Jerry
Jerry,
Why are you using InitPrinter? When I try that with my HP550c it just
re-initializes the printer and spits out a piece of paper. I tried Graphic dump
with a driver called HP_550C and it did a graphic dump of the workbench in a
fair color representation of it. Have you any other programs that can print
besides the C= supplied GFXdump program?
Personally I've been using a older verison of Studio Printer Software by Wolf
Faust. It supports the HP550C & provides preferences printer driver along with
a driver for Pagestream 2.2 (got to upgrade if I can to 2.0). It works fine and
is better than other drivers of its age.
Christopher
Christopher,
something most users don't know: usualy users have to run InitPrinter before
printing from a gfx printing program in order to initialise the printer. Now
you use the Studio Deskjet drivers and thus you don't have to run InitPrinter
as the drivers automaticly take care of initialising the printer. Not running
InitPrinter can easily result in offsets between pages, wrong paper sizes and
empty pages being ejected. As said, you don't need run InitPrinter with Studio
drivers unless you did a reset/Off-On on your printer after doing a printout.
The driver is unable to detect if you did a reset on your printer 😉
— Wolf Faust, Am Dorfgarten 10, 60435 Frankfurt, Germany —
Christopher,
<< Have you any other programs that can print besides the C= supplied GFXdump
program? >>
Yes. I have Imagemaster, but it gives the same results; just spits out page
after page of crap.
I thought of one more thing to try; I have this printer on an automatic A/B
switch that also receives a feed from my PC. I'm gonna try running the printer
directly into the Amiga, to be sure that the little auto-switch device isn't
doing something to screw it up. I'll post my results…
Thanks,
Jerry
Jerry! AHA! I have had a very similar problem with my A2000 using an auto A/B
switch. My IBM would do fine but the AMIGA would print gibberish. I swapped
the cables around & IBM always worked thru the A side or the B side but A2000 =
garbage. I hooked all my cables together to make a l-o-n-g cable to see if a
weak signal was being damped by the switch. The AMIGA did fine!! I borrowed a
manual switch; same problem! I tried my switch on a friend's A2000; worked
perfectly?!! i gave up. Someone on this net said it was a weak signal. Who
knows? It looks like I'll go for the Emplant 586 option someday. Good Luck!
Tom
it could be becuase his has a newer motherboard,or your serial/parralel ports
are damaged.
Tom,
The problem was my Amiga's incompatibility with the little automatic A/B switch
that I was attempting to use to share the printer between the Amiga and the PC.
After I removed it, everything worked fine.
Thanks,
Jerry
Hard to say what's causing your problem. If you use a printer switch box with
your Amiga&PC, don't use it. Also, make sure you use a short and good cable.
The Amiga is more sensible to bad cables.
— Wolf Faust, Am Dorfgarten 10, 60435 Frankfurt, Germany —
Thanks, Wolf. I'll try getting rid of the switchbox, and using something
shorter than the 25' cable that's on the printer now…
Jerry