| Survey of Mobile Printers and Scanners
For a survey of ports and protocol to print via a mobile or stationary
printer see the Different Environments chapter below.
CANON
: BJC-80 (this printer can also be used as a scanner with the optional
scan head!) David F. Davey wrote: "I finally have a Canon BJC-80
printer working properly with IrDA®. By properly I mean as a
pseudo-PostScript device by way of ghostscript and
a modified lpd.
How:
linux-2.2.7-ac2-irda6
/proc/sys/net/irda/slot_timeout increased to 10
(essential or discovery fails)
ghostscript DEVICE set to bjc600
printcap includes:
:xc#01777777:\
:fc#017:\
:fs#020000010002:
and lpd had to be modified to accept the ulong
fs and to handle xc (which is
documented but not coded in the lpd's I have looked at). "
For further information look at his page
BJC-80
.
Tim Auckland wrote: Would my version of lpd help?
unixlpr is a portable version of the lpr/lpd suite,
compatible with traditional versions and
RFC
1179 and with a couple of
minor extensions, including the :ms= field (also seen
in SunOS 4) and the ability to print directly to TCP connected printers
without needing special filters. ms allows you to
configure the tty using stty arguments directly, so if stty can handle
the extended flags, my lpd should handle IrDA® out of the box.
You can find the latest unixlpr
here
.
CANON
: BJC-50 65 of the size of the BJC-80,
Li-Ion battery included, and basically the same features as the BJC-80.
CANON
: BJ-30
Citizen
: CN-60
Pentax
: Pocketjet
HP: DeskJet 340Cbi. This is a small, portable, low-duty-cycle printer.
It prints either black, or color (3 color). I have had some problems
with it loading paper. Overall, the small size and portability make it a
nice unit for use with laptops. I use the HP 500/500C driver with Linux.
Olivetti: JP-90
MaxPoint
: TravelScan, mobile scanner for the PCMCIA port.
AFAIK only the HP DeskJet 340Cbi and the BJC-80 machine have an infrared
port. Pay attention to the supplied voltage of the power supply if you
plan to travel abroad. Sources:
http://www.lapshop.de
and others. I couldn't check the scan functionalities with Linux yet.
SANE
stands for Scanner Access Now Easy and is an
application programming interface (API) that provides standardized
access to any raster image scanner hardware (flatbed scanner, hand-held
scanner, video- and still-cameras, frame-grabbers, etc.). The SANE
standard is free and its discussion and developement is open to
everybody. The current source code is written for
UNIX (including Linux) and is available under the
GNU public license (commercial application and backends are welcome,
too, however).
GOCR
is optical character recognition software. It converts PGM files into ASC files.
For scanner drivers see
Linux Drivers for Handheld Scanners.
There are different ways to connect a printer or scanner to a laptop.
For printers usually: parallel port, serial port, USB
and IrDA® port. For scanners
usually: parallel port, SCSI (via PCMCIA or generic
SCSI port), USB and PCMCIA port.
All of them need the appropriate kernel drivers.
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