HPLIP

Forcing Black and White printing only 2605dn Color LaserJet

Asked by Bill Moseley

Debian Sid running CUPS.
Color LaserJet 2605dn.
This is a Postscript printer.

I suspect this is a bit off topic, but hopefully someone can help.

Thought I'd be smart and create two spoolers -- one for color printing one for blank and white to save on toner usage.
I noted in the PPD "*ColorDevice: True", so I created a new spooler with that PPD except changed ColorDevice to False.

This works great on, for example, OpenOffice -- everything is printed in B&W. But, printing from Firefox (or Safari from OS X)
it still prints in color.

I was just guessing about "ColorDevice" -- does that not do what I think it does?

Why does it work in OpenOffice but not with Firefox? This I'm a bit baffled by.

Is there another approach to accomplish black and white printing only? Frankly, I'm not sure if this will actually save me much
money in toner costs.

Thanks,

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Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

Bill,

If you run hp-toolbox, click on the device, then print settings, and scroll down to color options you should have a black only mode?

Hope this helps.

A

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Bill Moseley (moseley) said : 		#2

What does hp-toolbox modify? The PPD file? I'm not sure what else there is.

I'm actually not using hplip -- my printer (2605dn) is Postscript so hplip isn't really needed.

    https://answers.launchpad.net/hplip/+question/18070

But, maybe it alters different settings than the one I changed:

$ diff HP_Color_LaserJet_2605.ppd HP_BW_LaserJet_2605.ppd
70c70
< *ColorDevice: True
---
> *ColorDevice: False

Again, the weird thing is the this works when printing from OpenOffice -- but does not from Firefox (or from Safari from OS X clients).

Maybe the browsers don't use that PPD file.

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dwelch91 (dwelch91) said : 		#3

The toolbox modifies your ~/.cups/loptions file, which is supposed to override the default values in the PPD file. You can use the CUPS command lpoptions to set/view these settings. Other tools, such as XPP or Gtklp operate in the same manner as the toolbox (in that they add settings to the lpoptions file).

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