Printer Problem

[Basil Chupin]

On 20/05/12 05:53, Bill Vance wrote:
> Howdy folks;
>
> Ok, running 10.04 with a relatively new, "HP Officejet
> 6500A Plus."  I'm trying to print out a huge-mongous
> file.  For the curious, its the, "StdLib Reference
> Manual", for the HLA Assembler.  The stack of paper is
> allready well over 4 inches tall.  I can handle it when
> it runs out of paper, as the printer is rather well
> behaved about pausing for that.  Whats getting my goat
> is when the cartridge starts running out of ink, its
> rather difficult to be right on top of it, as it very
> slowly fades out to finally blank pages.  I have a 1/2"
> stack of now useless paper left over from the last time.
>
> Ok, so here's the question.  Does kde, (or anything
> else for that matter), have a printer util that can
> cause a printer to pause in the middle of a print job,
> and then let you back up in the file to before things
> started getting flakey, and restart the print job from
> there?  After I've changed the ink cartridge during
> the pause, that is.
>
> It seems to me that swaping out ribbons and cartridges
> etc. would be such a common place sort of thing, that
> someone somewhere would have created something like
> that, but who/what/where?
>
> Bill

Don't take my word for it, but I suspect that there is no such thing 
under KDE (or any other DE) because it is the driver from HP which 
controls the printer.

On the taskbar you should have a widget with "hp" in it. This should be 
installed when your printer was detected during installation of 10.04. 
If you right click on this widget you will get a menu 'HP Device 
Manager' which contains a tab which shows you the state of your 
cartridges. During printing keep an eye on this and stop the printer 
when you see the levels reach critical levels.

(BTW, there is a trick I read somewhere but cannot remember where which 
concerns the levels of cartridges for printers. Basically, the trick 
talks about that the manufacturers make you buy a new cartridge when 
there is quite a bit of ink still left in the cartridge, and the trick 
was to reset the cartridge so that it "sees" this remaining ink. If I 
recall correctly, it has something to do with using a paper-clip to push 
in some pin (just like you do with a CDROM reader to open the platter in 
an emergency. Do a search on the web re this.)

BC

-- 
Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE 4.8.3 and kernel 3.3.6 on a system with-
AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor
16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM
Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU