Tips for Twits

Caveats: This post is not to criticize Ricoh printer’s lack of Mac OS X support. It merely provides a workaround to do printing grayscale on Ricoh C2051 for Mac. What you can’t are printing colour and printing grayscale high quality than 600dpi.

There is a good reason why we need to pay a hefty S$1000 to be able to print from Mac. It is expensive to get the PostScript level 3 option on the Ricoh C2051 because Ricoh has to pay a license to Adobe. Ricoh picks genuine PostScript driver which ensures colour matching and high quality printing, while other manufacturers make compatible PostScript language chips.

So instead of using the original PostScript interpreter, we are going to use Ghostscript (an open-source PostScript interpreter that includes integrated support for the CUPS printing system in Mac OS X.) and Foomatic-Rip (a configurable printing filter to generate appropriate output using PostScript-Printer-Description (PPD)).

• Grab and install the required packages (pxlmono-xxx, foomatic-RIP-xxx and ghostscript-xxx) at Openprinting: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/macosx/pxlmono
• Once you are done, open your favourite web-browser, enter http://localhost:631/admin as the address. Authenticate yourself.
• Click on Add Printer – you should see the Ricoh 2051 printer under Discovered Network Printers. If not, select “LPD/LPR Host or Printer” under “Other Network Printers” and continue. Enter the “lpd://hostaddress”. Optionally, enter location, description for the printer.
• Choose Ricoh for Make/Manufacturer. Choose “Ricoh Aficio MP C2051 PXL” for the Model/Driver select dropdown. If there is no such entry, download the pxlcolor-Ricoh PPD at http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Ricoh/Ricoh-Aficio_MP_C2051
• In order to set Default Options to Grayscale and two-sided-long-edge, navigate to http://localhost:631/admin . Under Printer heading, click on Manage Printers, then select the printer we just added. Under Administration dropdown, select Set Default Options, then click on General tab, set Grayscale for Color Mode, Long-edge for Duplex.
• Finally, fire up your terminal and run the follow command (ignore %, it represents the terminal prompt)

  % sudo SystemStarter restart PrintingServices

Even if you have set the default monochrome printing option for the printer, some applications will not pick the default options automatically. So before submitting the print job, you have to select Printer Features in the Print dialog, choose Grayscale instead of Color for Color Mode option. Happy printing!