What are some good, easty-to-use printing solutions for Solaris?

A writeup by Carl Ehorn, below, provides a good summary.
It originally November 2001 appeared at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/solarisonintel/message/26467

I don't know if anyone has the same problems I did, but I
recently went looking for a good printing solution that didn't
require that I roll my own using Ghostscript and a bunch of
scripts. I've done that before, and it gets old fairly quickly.

I have a HP Deskjet 1220C, which is a color wide-carriage
printer with fairly high resolution capabilities. It can print
at 600x600 DPI color in normal modes, and can support up to
2400x2400 DPI color with HP software. However, that software
only works on Win machines, and I don't really need that high a
resolution in Solaris, as I do my graphics processing on Win
machines anyway.

My printer is hanging on an ethernet print-server box, which
allows it to be shared by any machine on the network. This
works very well, and has always worked in text modes from
Solaris. But I was looking for a Postscript solution, so that I
could print PDF files, Postscript files, and take advantage of
some of the advanced formatting capabilities that Postscript
provides. It's also nice to be able to print from a browser.

So I took a look at what's available on the web. Of course,
there is Ghostscript, Gimp-print, and other similar packages,
but they require a fair amount of work to make a seamless print
solution (at least on Solaris). So I also looked at Vividata's
P-Shop, CUPS, and ESP Print Pro. These last three are fairly
low-cost solutions for a single server, and I felt that the
prices they charge would be acceptable to me, considering the
time and effort they would save.

Vividata
I tried the Vividata package, and while it works fine, it did
not support any of the higher resolution modes the printer was
capable of. I should point out that Vividata is the only
package I found that had Color profile management available as
an option. I didn't try this, but it would be important if you
were doing pre-press graphics work. Vividata had a generic
driver for my printer, but had not updated it in some years,
and does not seem to be interested in providing further
development for the more recent printers that have been made.
They seem to feel that if a generic PCL driver works, that's
good enough. Vividata provides Postscript Level 2 support.

CUPS
I then tried the CUPS package, which is free on the web. There
is a lot of support for this system from the internet community,
including driver generators from the Gimp project. The Gimp
drivers have been reported to provide very high quality output
compared to the standard drivers, but require that you build and
install a lot of dependent packages in order to make use of
these better drivers. Again, this was looking like a lot of work
to get a good package working, and I wanted to avoid that.

The standard CUPS package had very disappointing output, and a
generic install using the recommended driver resulted in solid
black pages. Using an older, lower quality driver, I was able
to obtain 300 DPI 8-bit output. While this is OK, it's not good.
8-bit color results in a very noticeable dither in both color
and grayscale output, and while the 300 DPI text output was
fine, I found that some PDF files did not print text very well.
There were artifacts, and some aliasing in the outlines of
letters. Enabling debug output from the driver resulted in some
very confusing data. It appeared that the PS-2-raster conversion
was done at 100 DPI, then the raster to PCL was scaled up to
300 DPI. While the support staff for CUPS says that's impossible,
it sure looks that way from the debug output, and would also
explain the poor text quality from some applications.

CUPS is supported by the newsgroups and some of the same folks
who make ESP Print Pro. It supports Postscript Level 3 output.

ESP Print Pro
Last of all, I tried the ESP Print Pro package. This is an
enhanced product based on CUPS, but has considerably more
printer-specific drivers available, including one for my
printer. It installs just like CUPS, and also like CUPS, is a
replacement for the LP print system that comes with Solaris and
other UNIX variants. While I had some misgivings about
replacing the LP system, both CUPS and ESP Print Pro installed
easily, and with no problems.

I'm pleased to say the ESP Print Pro worked the best of all
these packages for me. I was able to set the defaults to
600x600 DPI, using CMYK color modes, and got a very noticeable
increase in the print quality. Text is crisp as any 600 DPI
laser, and I printed a 24-bit color scan of a photograph that
resulted in a very nice print. On plain paper, the colors are
not true, but are perfectly acceptable for a draft print. Note
that Windows also is unable to print accurate colors on plain
paper. This is not a fault of the software, but a limit in the
printer technology. Printing to coated photo paper would
probably provide a much more accurate print, but I did not
bother to test the ESP package in this mode, as I do photo work
on Windows. HP-supplied drivers work very well in Windows, and
has full support for the 2400 DPI mode.

With ESP Print Pro at 600 DPI, and using the CMKY color model,
the supplied Postscript test page printed well, and all signs of
dithering were gone, in both color and grayscale areas of the
page. Note that CUPS uses the same test page, so these can be
compared directly to see the differences between the packages.

I found that the native Imagetool program supplied with Solaris
crashed when trying to print my 24-bit TIFF test image, but
when I loaded the image into StarOffice's drawing program, it
printed perfectly, scaled exactly as it should have been.
StarOffice sees the new printing system with no problems, and
will print to the default printer without any required setup.
While I have not done much testing with StarOffice, I'd be
surprised if it had trouble, since the TIFF image printed
correctly. As the TIFF image was a 70MB file, this certainly is
one of the more stressful ways to test, and I encountered no
problems at all.

Both CUPS and ESP Print Pro provide printer and class management
using graphic interfaces. CUPS uses Netscape, or any GUI
browser, and all administration tasks can be done from the
browser, except for editing the daemon config files. ESP uses a
supplied program that presents a GUI interface in a compact,
simple to understand way, and is also easy to use. Like CUPS
(which it is based on), it does require manual editing of the
daemon config files. Any text editor will work fine for either
package.

Both CUPS and ESP Print Pro provide replacements for 'lpstat'
and associated programs, which would very much like the old
ones, but tie into the new driver system. Vividata's P-Shop
uses the standard lp system, and does not replace the existing
native programs. Vividata is the only package that I found
that supports printing through SCSI interfaces, so if you have
a SCSI printer, you should certainly look at their product
first. They also support SCSI scanners, which neither CUPS or
ESP Print Pro provide.

Vividata, CUPS, and ESP Print Pro all provide "try & buy"
downloads from the web, so you can check out any package you
are interested in for a trial period at no cost. Vividata
allowed me to download and install their package twice, which
was nice of them. They also provide students will the package
for free, but don't provide support on the free version. CUPS
is also free for download, and support has been handed off to
the community through a number of newsgroups. ESP provides
support for a fee, which can get expensive in a corporate
environment, but is probably in line with any other commercial
package that provides similar features.

Each of these packages has it's strong points, but for me the
ESP package seems to be the best match with my needs. Your
mileage may vary, based on your needs, the interface your
printer uses, and the drivers available for your specific
printer.

I hope this information will save you time and trouble, and if
you have not already installed some kind of printing solution,
will encourage you to take advantage of these products. There
seems to be something for every budget, and the free packages
available, while not perfect, will at least get your printer
functioning under Solaris.

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