Three weeks ago I declared my printer dead. That was a difficult decision but the black printing doesn’t work anymore. My options were to buy a new and luxurious HP printer or maybe get another cheaper Canon and battle 30 minutes to make it work. My budget said me “GET THE CANON” and I got it working in a 64 bits Funtoo ^_^.

So one of the first thing that I forget about Canon printers is how to enable the gray scale printing, the economic modes, and the higher resolutions. Canon only gives a .ppd (Postscript Printer Driver) file with RGB mode, 600 dpi in resolution and normal printing. But if I elect a cheaper printer I want the cheapest cost of property . So let’s enable it.

Step 0: Uninstall it.

Yes, if you have installed the printer. You need to uninstall it because we need to edit the properties in the .ppd file.

Step 1: Find your .ppd file.

With a find or an slocate

# find / -name canon*.ppd

# slocate -e / canon*.ppd

Step 2: Edit the .ppd file

This procedure is generic in most of the Canon printers (I tried with ip1000 and ip1800), in the case of the ip1800 you have to open the file with your favorite text editor:

# vi /usr/share/cups/model/canonip1800.ppd

Lets edit it. First of all we need to ADD this lines to enable the grayscale

*OpenUI *CNGrayscale/Grayscale: Boolean
*DefaultCNGrayscale: False
*CNGrayscale True/Yes: True
*CNGrayscale False/No: False
*CloseUI: *CNGrayscale

And to enable the economic and higher quality printings ADD:

*OpenUI *CNQuality/Quality: PickOne
*DefaultCNQuality: 3
*CNQuality 2/High: “2″
*CNQuality 3/Normal: “3″
*CNQuality 4/Standard: “4″
*CNQuality 5/Economy: “5″
*CloseUI: *CNQuality

To enable more resolutions we need to EDIT this section:

*OpenUI *Resolution/Output Resolution: PickOne
*DefaultResolution: 600
*Resolution 600/600 dpi: “<>setpagedevice”
*CloseUI: *Resolution

replacing it with:

*OpenUI *Resolution/Output Resolution: PickOne
*DefaultResolution: 600
*Resolution 300/300 dpi: “<</HWResolution[300 300]>>setpagedevice”
*Resolution 600/600 dpi: “<</HWResolution[600 600]>>setpagedevice”
*Resolution 1200/1200 dpi: “<</HWResolution[1200 1200]>>setpagedevice”
*Resolution 2400/1200 dpi: “<</HWResolution[2400 1200]>>setpagedevice”
*Resolution 4800/1200 dpi: “<</HWResolution[4800 1200]>>setpagedevice”
*CloseUI: *Resolution

That’s all, now we have enabled the economic modes

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posted by tuxtor
Tags: Canon, CUPS, grayscale, ip1000, ip1800, linux
Filed under: Freedom tutorials