Monday, August 19, 2002

More OpenOffice Printing -- 10:43 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Last night I mercilessly slaughtered a few more trees in an effort to make printing look better in OpenOffice in Linux. This time, I was trying various Ghostscript drivers that work with my HP Deskjet 810C. I had been using HP's hpijs driver which, according to Linux Printing, is supposed to give the best results. It works great with output from WordPerfect, but OpenOffice output looks like garbage (fonts aren't crisp at all and every other line is darker than the rest). After that, I tried the cdj880 driver which produced infinitely crisper text, but it had an odd greenish hue to it as if it was using the color cartridge to produce black instead of the black cartridge. WordPerfect output looked great with that driver.

Finally, I tried the cdj550 driver. Not only did the printing get done much faster, but the output looks very nice. No odd hues, no alternating dark lines, no fuzzy fonts. The only caveat is that after a print job is done, the "eject paper" light flashes. Punching the button makes it go away. Eureka!

All in all, it seems that OpenOffice's PostScript generator could use some work, but at least I got it to work. There is a new version of HP's driver that I would like to try, but it would mean upgrading to Ghostscript 7.05. I'm not sure if I have the stomach for that, especially since it seems to be working decently. I have to give credit to HP for making a driver and releasing it completely open source with a BSD-style license.

Now I just have to get used to OpenOffice. Most of the frustrations I've felt with it is just because I don't understand how all of its functions work. That will come with time. If nothing else, I will use it for all the M$ Office docs people insist on sending me. It imports Word, Excel, and PowerPoint stuff very nicely--better than any non-Office app I've tried.

News for 08/19/2002

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