[cups] Newbie seeks help / FreeBSD 12.0 / Brother MFC-7860DW

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: [cups] Newbie seeks help / FreeBSD 12.0 / Brother...:

> I went googling, and found one
> here:
>
> https://github.com/illwieckz/debian_copyist_brother/blob/master/material/abstract/printers/generated_content/ppd/MFC7860DW.ppd

I didn't look at it closely, but a quick glance showed that it looked
reasonable for a PPD.  However...

Even if you get it added successfully, there's an issue.  If you look at
the file, you'll see that line 18 is

 	*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 brlpdwrapperMFC7860DW"

That basically means that to prepare files in a format that can be
rendered by that printer, CUPS will want to run a filter command on your
system called

 	brlpdwrapperMFC7860DW

It would probably need to be installed somewhere like

 	/usr/lib/cups/filter/brlpdwrapperMFC7860DW

Basically, wherever CUPS keeps its format-conversion filters.

If you don't have that filter installed on your system, printing isn't
going to work.  Looking at openprinting.org, it looks like you might have
to download that from Brother's support site.

> I have almost no understanding of the material in this file, except for
> the self-explanitory parts.  Anyway, I tried to use that MFC7860DW.ppd file,
> which I had saved a copy of to my local /tmp/ directory, as the .ppf file
> in order to complete the "add" of my printer.
>
> This failed, of course, for reasons that are entierly beyond my understanding.
> The failure message(s) is/are more than a little cryptic:
>
>    Unable to open PPD file:
>        Missing asterisk in column 1

I don't know if that's because of the PPD, or if it's because of some
security layer on your system.

One thing you could try is check to see if your system has the command

 	cupstestppd

installed.  If it does, you could run that with '-v' on the file you
downloaded, to see what the PPD tester has to say about the file.

> Note that the file /tmp/MFC7860DW.ppd is world readable (0644) on my system,
> so this is evidently not a permissions problem.
>
> Where can I get a .ppd file for an MFC-7860DW that cupsd will actually
> like, rather than reject?

Since openprinting.org points to the Brother support site, that may be
where you need to start looking.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
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