I simply can't believe the trouble I've had trying to find a printer I
can use with NetBSD, assuming a vanilla serial port.  It seems that all
vendors supply drivers for Windows, some supply drivers for Macs, and
no vendor is interested in either writing drivers for Unix or supplying
enough printer information to make it possible for me to write my own
driver.  Speaking with the pre-sales support people at Epson and HP has
been painful.

Of course, if I could afford to buy a PostScript printer, all of this
would be moot, but I was assuming I could get a low-end inkjet printer,
and use various widely available tools to translate what I want to
print to some kind of bitmap, and feed the bitmap to the printer.
However, I can't find out how to do this (from the point of view of the
printer), or if it is even possible (and in the case of HP, it seems
that their "HP PPA" printer language may do extensive physical control
of the printer, as opposed to having a few control sequences for
particular functions).  I have searched the Web as well as talking to
the vendor pre-sales people and salesfolks in stores, and I've come to
the end of my resources (and patience!).

Surely there are people out there with printers attached to their
NetBSD machines, perhaps even modern inkjet printers.  What works?


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Computing Services, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne@alcor.concordia.ca                                       (514) 848-7606