Unprintable no more

It looks like my problems printing to the multifunction printer/coper/fax are OS rather than hardware related. While obsessing over yesterday's problems over dinner last night, it occurred to me that the computers on which printing worked with the HP gimp PPD were computers that had been upgraded from Panther to Tiger. Since we don't generally do "clean" installs on upgrades, it's possible that some older drivers were lying around that wouldn't be available on machines that came with 10.4 on them. Thus, the iBook. It was purchased last summer, and is currently running 10.4.3 (only because I haven't gotten around to upgrading to 10.4.4).

And, lo and behold, it was giving me the same problems. I could print just fine from my old iMac, but print jobs stalled from the iMac, when the printer was added in exactly the same way.

And then I remembered the CUPS link! When I looked at the listings for the printer on the old iMac and on the iBook, they had different Device URIs. I manually changed the device URI on the iBook to "socket://xx.xx.xx.xx/?bidi" just as it appeared on the older iMac, and clicked on test page. The test page printed just fine.

So, the next thing to do was go back to the Intel iMac. I modified the printer description that I'd defined using the Print Center, printed a test page, and Bob's Your Uncle!

I can print, and I can even print double-sided. Life is good.