Epson 1520 WILL NOT BE SUPPORTED

[broesler]

I fax'd Epson to support requests for a 1520 driver for OSX. Here's part of their mailed response:

"Epson has no plans to develop a driver for the model. Please keep in mind that not all features of the printer are supported in OSX, i.e. paper sizes, and built in storage devices".

Can someone shed some light on the comment regarding paper size?

[Matthew Giampapa]

They may not be 100% correct that's all. Actually OS X has support for all of the paper sizes that OS 9 does.

The part about storage devices doesn't make much sense to me either. I was not aware the the Epson 1520 had any built in storage.

My guess is that Epson would prefer to sell new printer with OS X drivers instead of spending the time to get the 1520 fully working. They just make money that way, and remember that the 1520 is a fairly old printer. AFAIK, Epson is under no obligation to provide an OS X driver.

However, there was this post on Usenet a while back that details how to modify the Epson 850N driver to works with the 1520 on OS X. (Of course, this is something to try at your own risk!)

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=afarnhamNoSpam-CCA88F.18492028052002%40news1.meganetnews.com&output=gplain

Matthew GiampapaNNA Technical Support

[Kea]

Another solution is to download a Gimp Print driver:

http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php3

Remember install Ghostscript, too.

There's also some mess with the paper sizes - I had to make custom sized A2-paper relative to the printable area of Epson 1520. At the moment it shows show only in the Page Setup menu of "Any Printer"... so first I choose it there and then change the printer to Epson 1520. Now the paper is also changed to "Other", but the mesures are the customized ones.

[broesler]

Gimp-Print + OSX.2 does allow the 1520 to work again, but I cannot seem to get anything other than the letter, legal, & A4 size sheets. I too created a custom paper size (13.85 x 22) set under "Any Printer"in the Page Setup dialog box. The 1520 was then chosen in the Print dialog box, but the printed area was still just letter size corresponding to the page area bounding box shown in the VW window. How did you get the custom paper size to work? Thanks. It will be great to get this 1520 going again.

[Kea]

Very strange: I have all kinds of new paper sizes in the pop up menu of the Epson printer by default - only my custom ones don't show up. This might mean that your installation of the Gimp-print driver wasn't 100% successful. (I don't know, what the Ghost Script does, but propably it hasn't anything to do with paper sizes

When you choose your custom size paper, does the bounding box change to a corresponding one in the first place? It just should keep the same when you change the printer. Only the name of the paper should change to "Other", dimensions remain the customized ones. Should remain.

[broesler]

Christa

Thanks for your comment. I wasn't sure whether or not I had loaded EPS Ghostscript (probably not because I don't usually print to a postscript printer) so I loaded it just to be sure everything was included, and sure enough, the next time I used VW9.5.3 via Mac OX.2 to print from the Epson 1520 (which has the optional postscript drivers installed, I think) I got all kinds of paper sizes available via the Page Setup dialog box. I still haven't been able to figure out how to specify a custom page size that works, but that's OK because I just chose A2 paper and then positioned my drawing sheet border lines just inside the printable area as determined by test printing an A2 sheet with rulers horizontally and vertically to see where the print area limits are. Finally, I can use this printer again. Anyone with an Epson 1520 other formerly unsupported printer under OSX.2 should check into Gimp-Print. An advantage of the open-source nature of the new Mac system.

[Yovav]

Excuse me for moving the discussion a bit towards the Windows world, but I'm also having trouble with the Epson 1520.

I'm using the 1520 with a WIN machine (XP, P4 1.7) and VW 9.5.2. In the past (on Win ME) everything was fine, but since upgrading to XP I had some troubles with the 1520 drivers.

Epson didn't release updated drivers for XP and I have to use the Win 2000 driver, or the built-in 1520 driver, coming bundled with the XP installer.

The Win 2000 driver keeps offering all the printer preference and options but print very slowly. The XP built-in driver works faster (not as fast as it was on ME, but faster) but got a limited interface, that blocks some of the printer functions, like 1440 dpi printing.

Do you know any solution to these problems? Any work around?