Dell 3110 Laser Printer - Driver

Since this printer uses PostScript, all you should have to do is find the old PPD and point the driver to it.

No, that is an icc profile. You might be able to get it from the old Dell installer for that printer. You may need to use Pacifist to extract the PPD file.

What happens when you try using the Dell print driver? I downloaded and installed it. In Snow Leopard, you will not have the Secure Print or Job Accounting features available, but I think it should still work otherwise. I was able to do some test prints to an emulated printer (print to file rather than a printer). I was able to produce PostScript that Preview could interpret and display.

You could also try the PostScript PPD for the Dell 3100. I think they are very similar printers. That PPD is available from http://cups.org/ppd/dell/en/dl3100cn.ppd.gz.

All you are looking for is the PPD file. That is a text file, or it may be compressed as a .gz file. Whether it is or not does not matter. Once you have that, you can choose it as the driver, by selecting Options & Supplies for the printer in Print & Fax, and the Driver tab. The version may not matter, as it is usually other things that change during updates.

That is the same version of the PPD file that I got from downloading the Dell driver CD image.

Bruce is correct that most of the time, the PPD is all you need for a PostScript printer. In this particular instance, however, you will need to modify the PPD or use the Dell installer to install other software. The PPD that you have contains a line that calls on PDEs (printer description extensions) that need to be installed. Otherwise, the print job will fail and you will be told you need extra software.

If you don't want to install the Dell drivers using the Dell installer, you can simply delete the following line from the PPD before you add the printer:

*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 /Library/Printers/Dell/filter/DellSecureFilter"

Message was edited by: Matt Broughton