Operation Manual

Printer Operation

openSUSE® supports printing with many types of printers, including remote network

printers. Printers can be congured manually or with YaST. For conguration instruc-

tions, refer to Section “Setting Up a Printer” (Chapter 2, Setting Up Hardware Compo-

nents with YaST, ↑Start-Up). Both graphical and command line utilities are available

for starting and managing print jobs. If your printer does not work as expected, refer

to Section 11.7, “Troubleshooting” (page 158).

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is the standard print system in openSUSE.

Printers can be distinguished by interface, such as USB or network, and printer language.

When buying a printer, make sure that the printer has an interface (like USB or parallel

port) that is available on your hardware and a suitable printer language. Printers can be

categorized on the basis of the following three classes of printer languages:

PostScript Printers

PostScript is the printer language in which most print jobs in Linux and Unix are

generated and processed by the internal print system. If PostScript documents can

be processed directly by the printer and do not need to be converted in additional

stages in the print system, the number of potential error sources is reduced.

Standard Printers (Languages Like PCL and ESC/P)

Although these printer languages are quite old, they are still undergoing expansion

to address new features in printers. In the case of known printer languages, the

print system can convert PostScript jobs to the respective printer language with the

help of Ghostscript. This processing stage is referred to as interpreting. The best-

known languages are PCL (which is mostly used by HP printers and their clones)

and ESC/P (which is used by Epson printers). These printer languages are usually

Printer Operation 149