Since I will never let my beloved HP LaserJet 1200 (firmware build date 2001-02-14) die, see previous post, I did some fiddling to figure out the best driver.

TL;DR install hplip and use /usr/share/ppd/HP/hp-laserjet_1200-pcl3.ppd.gz. Don’t use hp-setup. This driver prints quickly and without errors.

What doesn’t work

  • If you use the hp-setup script it will try and use the hp-laserjet_1200-ps.ppd.gz driver. This is incredibly slow and sometimes makes the printer spit out amusing error pages.
  • If you try and specify the .ppd manually in hp-setup, it will crash because apparently it doesn’t support python3, nice. I just specified it from KDE’s GUI. It looks like it should work from the CUPS web interface too, just don’t select postscript.
  • pxlmono from openprinting.org didn’t work, it just loaded forever.