After my good old Brother black & white laser printer died some months ago, I decided to buy a HP Color LaserJet 3600dn after a huge market comparison and literary study. I am quite happy with the printer. It is working perfect using CUPS on Linux on all of my favourite distributions out of the box. So i thought using this printer with Apple’s latest Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) would be child’s play.

But unfortunately Apple does not ship a fitting driver and the software provided by HP is not really compatible with Mac OSX 10.5. Of course you can use the basic printing feature, but if it comes to duplex printing there is now way to get this enabled with the tools provided by Apple and HP.

Fortunately I encountered at Open Printing a project of Linux Foundation a port of hpijs for Mac OSX. After downloading and installing all three required packages (Footmatic, Ghostscript and hpijs) all printer features worked just fine. Kudos to all guys working on Open Printing!

Was my expectation to have this working out of the box by Apple - the owner of CUPS - too high? I do not think so. Most interestingly there is a relatively long discusion in Apple’s discussion  oard, which has been closed without any official statement or solution.  Hopefully Apple includes Footmatic and hpijs in one of their future releases or releases at least a support document for this issue.