Today I had to print something. My aging DeskJet refused to print it in sufficient quality again. I had to use another printer connected to a Windows machine. That meant an interesting challenge to print a Czech OpenOffice.org document on Windows. OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 PDF export produced a document with Czech characters missing. This can be fixed by printing the document into PostScript and converting it to PDF. Such a PDF looks well in xpdf but not so in Acrobat on Windows, which can’t display Czech characters in it correctly. Fortunately, PDF export in OpenOffice.org 2 beta seems to be fixed so after two hours of hardware and software experiments I was finally able to print the document.
That story encouraged me to buy a new printer. About a year ago I considered buying Epson R200, but I got discouraged because of very expensive ink and paper. Today, there is Epson R220 available, it’s a bit cheaper than R200 was last year and the ink and paper seem to get cheaper as well. I need new printer anyway, so I’ll give it a try. HP is out of question, all HP devices I tried to use have suffered from some troubles so far. Low-end Canon printers may be more economic, with less clogging troubles and with a better text printing quality when compared to Epson. But unlike Epson, Canon seems to be careless about Linux drivers thus their devices are completely useless to me. Epson printers are well supported on Linux and I’ve already got good experiences with two Epson scanners on Linux, so Epson is where I’m going to spend my inkjet money.
Leave a Reply