David Harrison writes:
> That's a mite harsh. For my ancient Brother HL5170-DN, Brother
> provide downloadable (sadly blob-only) deb and rpm packages. Not
> every printer manufacturer goes that far.

For the record: All three of the Brother printers I've bought had/have good
linux support, and I'll gladly buy another. (MFC-8880DN, HL-1450 and I
don't remember the oldest.) But I won't buy a non-ps printer. Those vary
far too much.

> I've had success adding the printer directly via the CUPS web
> interface too, though it pays to be very careful about *which*
> port, service, page control language etc is selected from the
> many options that appear for that model. PCL tends to work
> better in my limited experience, perhaps because Brother's
> PostScript emulation (BRScript) seems to have a few
> idiosyncrasies.

It's not too bad. I think it's based on ghostscript. The biggest oddness
I've found (I've written a couple of printer drivers) is that the character
repertoire differs from that in Adobe fonts. Both contain ASCII, but things
like MS-DOS graphics drawing is another matter entirely.

Arnt
PS: Postscript sweetness: http://bit.ly/1egXCAL