Printing in MAC OS X 10.6.8

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Printing in MAC OS X 10.6.8

Trouble printint to a Dell Laser MFP 1815dn.

At first I kep getting 'Offline'. Rebooting the printer worked occasionally. But now its persistent -- always offline and cannot get it to print from my iMac. Have tried all of the following in this order:

1) Dell printer driver install

But given the age of the driver, low hopes it would work. No change in behavior. Still persistently 'Offline' no matter how many times I reboot the printer, the computer, the network.

2) Font Book cleanup

Used Font Book to resolve all duplicate font installs. Now I get garbage to print out. This includes:

ERROR: syntaxerror

OFFENDING COMMAND: true

STACK:

-mark-

/sfnts

3) Gutenprint Driver Install

Downloaded these generic drivers from the Apple website and installed. Then added 'new' printers by selecting the Dell and configuring with the generic PS and then with the generic PCL drivers. All I get out of the printer is garbage including:

ERROR: undefined

OFFENDING COMMAND: pu

STACK:

/hyphen

94

Ideas that would help someone like me who thinks that Apple stuff is great, except for their casual disregard of their customers who want to use any product that is not Apple...

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Feb 11, 2012 2:39 AM

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Answer 1

fane_j

Level 4

3,697 points

Feb 11, 2012 3:25 AM in response to pharmastat59

pharmastat59 wrote:

Trouble printint to a Dell Laser MFP 1815dn.

Check if the Dell driver is PPC. If it is, and if you installed the first version of Apple's latest Security Update, then that's probably where the issue is, because it broke Rosetta, the software which runs PPC code under SL. Re-install the Sec Update (the problem is fixed in v1.1, which replaced the goofy version on Apple's servers) through Software Update or by downloading it again, then re-install the Dell driver, and try again.

Apple stuff is great, except for their casual disregard of their customers who want to use any product that is not Apple

I'm sorry, but that's non-sense. I'm no fan of Apple, but they're no better and no worse than any large corporation of this type. Mostly, they do things which make business sense as they see it -- which is exactly what you'd want, if you had serious money invested in Apple shares -- wouldn't you?

In this instance, it was up to Dell to release an Intel Mac driver for this printer/scanner, which is, what, 5 or 6 years old? If they didn't, it was probably because they decided it didn't make business sense for them to spend money on developing and testing one. Keep in mind that Dell and Apple and Microsoft and all the rest are in business to make money, not to support every single customer for ever and ever and a day.

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