Comment 3 for bug 141487

Revision history for this message
Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter) wrote :

The problem is not in any of the printer setup tools. The tools handle this PPD correctly. The problem are very confusing names and UI strings for the choices of the "Print Quality" option by Brother. The option entry in the PPD looks like this:

*OpenUI *CAPT/Print Quality:PickOne
*OrderDependency: 10 AnySetup *CAPT
*DefaultCAPT: Middle
*CAPT Low/300 dpi: "<</HWResolution [300 300] >> setpagedevice"
*CAPT Middle/600 dpi: "<</HWResolution [600 600] >> setpagedevice"
*CAPT Fine/HQ 1200: "<</HWResolution [1200 1200] >> setpagedevice
statusdict/true1200 known{statusdict begin false true1200 end}if
"
*CAPT SFine/1200 dpi: "<</HWResolution [1200 1200] >> setpagedevice
statusdict/true1200 known{statusdict begin true true1200 end}if
"
*CloseUI: *CAPT

Looking at the machine-readable (command line) names of the choices (names before the slash "/") then one sees that "HQ 1200" (Fine) is a lower print quality than "1200 dpi" (SFine = Super Fine?), which goes fully against what a user woul think when he only sees the UI strings in a menu. Here a user would be much better served when he would see "Low", "Middle", "Fine", and "Super Fine" in the "Print Quality" menu. Or "HQ 1200" should be renamed to "600 dpi enhanced").

HP has similar choices for the print quality. They call the two choices for 1200 dpi "FastRes 1200" and "ProRes 1200" with which a user recognizes much easier which one gives the higher quality.

The bug is in Brother's PPD (and probably also present in Windows if there are no icons or tooltips). Unfortunately, I have no contact to the person who made the PPD. It was posted on OpenPrinting in 2005. I got it by someone from Brother Europe who also has no contact to the people who have made the PPDs.

Considering how long no one from Brother posted new PPDs or updated the existing ones, we can modify the options without problem and will not run in any maintenance problems.