LaserJet 5M ppd Problems

[Marco Nierlich]

Hi all

I have a HP LaserJet 5M here, and it's working ok with the 
ESP -> HP LaserJet series driver, but the quality of the printouts is not so
good (mostly in grayscaling there are ugly rough scalings, no smooth
gradient).
I notice the same quality problem with the Gimp-Print PPD File for the
LaserJet 5 Series (not 5M). I only have the Gimp-Print because of my color
Inkjet printer but anyway tried out their LaserJet driver.

However, when I use the ESP -> HP LaserJet Series PCL6, I get the perfect
grayscale gradients, but the printing of one single page takes minutes (up
to 5). I have 22MB of RAM in the printer, but the PPD does not allow to
configure that.

So I went to the cups printer database and saw that for the LaserJet 5M
(which I have), there is the Postscript driver which is recommended, but
with that driver, I only get control characters to paper (first page,
followed by infinite (?) empty pages) but no desired output. Same happens
if I use the non-postscript PPD from cups.org for my printer (which is btw
the only driver that lets me define if I have more or less than 11MB of
RAM).

How can I have the speed of the normal LaserJet series driver with the
Quality from PCL6? Even if it takes a little longer for printing, it would
be ok, but 5 minutes for one page (I have to print PDFs with several
hunderds of pages) is too much :-(

What additional info do you need? Maybe that my printer is connected by
ethernet? Could this be an issue?

Thanks
Marco