substitute driver for konica minolta pagepro 1350w

[Andrew]

Does anyone know of any other drivers that will work with the pagepro
1350w, besides the one that ships with it?

I have a custom application that needs to scale the printed page
(height and width separately), while at the same time adjusting the
left and top margin. In effect, I'm stretching the printed page to
match a standard I was given. If I print to the company's HP printer,
it scales according to the coordinates I pass in my print routine. I
can make it print each of the four corners at any spot on the page I
want, thereby stretching the image. But when I print to the pagepro,
it ignores the custom settings and prints based on the paper size.

I tried every possible combination of settings (paper size, scaling, x
& y offsets) that the print driver allows, but I can't make it scale
the same as the HP. I also need to be able to set it to print at 300
x 300 DPI, which the supplied driver doesn't have a setting for. It
has 1200 x 1200 and 600 x 600, but I need it to handle 300 x 300 also.
When I try to use a different driver (even another minolta), it won't
print at all. It's a local printer using USB, not that it should
matter.

Andrew

 

[Elmo P. Shagnasty]

Does anyone know of any other drivers that will work with the pagepro
1350w, besides the one that ships with it?

I have a custom application that needs to scale the printed page
(height and width separately), while at the same time adjusting the
left and top margin. In effect, I'm stretching the printed page to
match a standard I was given. If I print to the company's HP printer,
it scales according to the coordinates I pass in my print routine. I
can make it print each of the four corners at any spot on the page I
want, thereby stretching the image. But when I print to the pagepro,
it ignores the custom settings and prints based on the paper size.

I tried every possible combination of settings (paper size, scaling, x
& y offsets) that the print driver allows, but I can't make it scale
the same as the HP. I also need to be able to set it to print at 300
x 300 DPI, which the supplied driver doesn't have a setting for. It
has 1200 x 1200 and 600 x 600, but I need it to handle 300 x 300 also.
When I try to use a different driver (even another minolta), it won't
print at all. It's a local printer using USB, not that it should
matter.

This is a Windows printer--which means that it doesn't have an onboard
processor or operating system to process high level page description
language.

Instead, the Windows GDI display information is passed to your Windows
print driver--which in this case is actually the RIP, the raster image
processor itself for this marking engine. Once the RIP is finished (it
uses your host computer's power to do all the work in turning your
document into a laser bitmap), it sends the bitmap to the marking engine
over the USB cable.

So in the case of a cheap printer like this, no, you won't find any
other driver to drive that marking engine.

What you describe with the HP printer is (a) a better driver, and (b) a
laser printer with its own onboard processor (and, additionally <c> the
ability for any computer to print to it using a driver that generates
the high level page description language that the onboard processor
digests). In a case like that, the processor takes in PCL or
Postscript--and you could try other PCL or Postscript drivers to try to
get different results. But with a Windows printer like your Konica
Minolta, you need the processing software that came with it. They call
it a "driver" but really it's the entire RIP done up in software only,
piggybacking onto your host computer's processing power.