Th drivers are reverse-engineered I think. Certainly not Canon-supplied. The problems with empty ink are the same from windows (with canon supplied drivers) though, so I guess it’s in the printers firmware.
I can set the printer in a ‘don’t complain about empty ink tanks’ mode via some sort of magic button combination on the printer itself, and then I can scan (or print B/W if the blue has run out). But I don’t leave this on permanently because actually printing a color that has run out will break the print heads because they need the ink as a coolant. (My previous printer died that way). So I can actually scan, but it’s an annoying nuisance that scanning is even coupled to printing error messages.
well, tries to - blank space where specified colour should be.
You want to watch out doing this. As I said earlier this can break your print heads, depending on the model of printer of course.
Oh, I only ever do it once per tank. And in truth, only until it becomes noticeable - I’ve only ever once, inadvertently, let it get to the ‘printing air’ stage. But it ensures the tank in question is actually empty, not “low” - which is when it starts to ask to be replaced. Some say I’m frugal, others call it something else.
Hmph. I prepped for that one by copying my entire user folder elsewhere. That’s when I noticed that some apps had been throwing a fuckton of library crap into user space storage that shouldn’t be there. (Mainly development environments.) Microsoft made it awkward to use the program directories, so they jammed them in user space. Wrong!
Ugh; WinPrinters. They sucked back then, they suck now, they’ll suck for all of eternity.
PCL can do some hilarious tricks (the infamous display prank to change the display on the printer to say… whatever you want is one of them). Postscript can also do some fun things; google “postscript processing speed test” for an outstanding example of what plain, version 1.0 postscript can do with a printer’s rendering engine.
I have a soft spot in my toner-blackened, shriveled heart for the laserjet 4 series (4/4+) and to a lesser extent, the 4000 series. robust, easy to maintain, and with proper care and feeding the engines will easily give you several million pages before a major overhaul.
Canon copiers (aka ImageRunners) are a pain in the tuckus for drivers; moreso with the driver model they moved to for their ‘universal’ printer driver, which breaks every single other canon printer on the print server if you put in in; the only way to fix it is to remove all the printers and start over, or roll the entire server back to before you installed the stupid thing. (ask me how I know this.) The only other canon printers I’ve dealt with have been a version 1.x bubblejet (20+ years ago!) and a brand spanking new pixma TR8530, which I’ve been using as a photo printer expressly and not as a daily driver. (jury is still out on the pixma; still on the OE tanks for it.)
