• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

LaserWriter PAPs and latest OSX

beachycove

Well-known member
The latest OSX drops AppleTalk-only LaserWriters from its list of supported printers. Fair enough, but these printers can actually still be used from one of these machines via a print server, using a generic postscript driver. This works fine, most of the time. The exception is when you have need for specific features like manual paper feed.

The missing PAP files are simply text files that say things like the postscript version and the options available in the printer. There is nothing particularly fancy or complicated in them. PAP text files can easily be found 'out there' or indeed on a X.4 machine or whatever. They could therefore be added to a system, in principle; it is UNIX, after all.

But where would they go in the latest OSX? All I can see in the Library are zipped PAP files; obviously the system is not printing using those zipped files. Can't find anything else. Are the active ones hidden, or what?

 

beachycove

Well-known member
I think I have it figured out: System > Library . Printers > PPDs > Contents > Resources. Will give it a shot.

It seems that all the printer definitions are compressed (gz) files. Why so?

 
Top