Issues with Linux and HP printers

   Since I have access to a new printer, I (of course) had issues with it. As I tried different kinds of connection with CUPS (ipp://, ipps://, http://, socket://) and different drivers (hpijs, hpcups), the page would sometimes render blank lines as black strips of ink or print with some weird margins. 

   But, I have found the solution! 

   It turns out that the hplip package comes with a command called hp-setup, which can be used to configure your network printer. The tool setup the printer with the hpijs driver, but with an hp:// connection. The hp:// connection string I could not have guessed. It seems to be a combination of the printer model and other things, but it isn't explicited anywhere (that I know of). 

   Anyhow, now everything works fine. I hope this short post helps you. 

Printer margins issues with Samsung CLP-310N

   Although this is a rather specific issue concerning the Samsung CLP-310N, I thought it could be a good idea to share the solution to a longstanding problem I was having. 

   For some reason, when I upgraded CUPS some time ago (I don't recall specifically when this began), printing PDFs and other documents from my Arch Linux box was difficult. The documents were not properly centered on the page (the top margin was way too low). So, I googled for something interesting. I came up with someone saying that the SPL-C driver seemed to be the cause and that switching to foo2qpdl solved the problem.

   I immediately tried to change my printer's driver to this one with CUPS (on my machine, I just go to http://localhost:631), but the driver was not in the list, even though the foo2qpdl XML file comes with foomatic-db, which I had installed a while back. 

   Okay, the quick solution is:

yaourt -S foo2zjs

then you will be able to select the Foomatic/foo2qpdl from the drop-down menu in CUPS. This is an AUR package, which seems to be well maintained. 

Anyway, hope this helps. Certainly helped me!