Unprintable

The laboratory has two types of networked printers. We have a variety of HP Laser Jets, some publicly available and some not. The older ones are reachable only by AppleTalk, but the newer ones have IP numbers and/or announce themselves by Bonjour/Rendezvous. We also have three multifunction machines. Two are photocopier/printers, and the third functions as a fax also. The company that provides them rebadges them; two are made by Toshiba and one by Canon. Printing to the Toshibas, including the one closest to my desk, has always been an iffy proposition, especially from a Macintosh. But, generally, it's possible to print, using the Generic Postscript driver. Before I upgraded to Tiger, I was able to define a printer queue based on its IP number, and use a PPD file that allowed me to do things like duplex. But since, the upgrade, that hasn't worked. A colleague, however, has managed to print to it and access these features using an HP driver, but I haven't been able to make that work.

For the past hour, I've been trying all sorts of permutations (a lot of HP LaserJet 5 PPDs are available), and have been unable to print to the copier/printer. At best, I've been getting semi-informative error messages like "unable to get printer status (server-error-operation-not-supported)." Using the CUPS HPLaserJet 4Si Gimp PPD that my colleague has no problem with gives me "Printer busy; will retry in 10 seconds..."... Hmmm...wonder if it's a firewall problem. I'll have to wrestle with that tomorrow. Fortunately, I had no difficulty printing to the closest true HP printer.

UPDATE: Defining the printer via AppleTalk rather than IP, but using the HP PPD gives me still a different set of errors. Essentially, printing stalls at 24% of the first page. In contrast, the same printer setup from my old iMac works fine. Something's different here.