Re: Printing as an example: has embrace and extend accomplished it's objectives?

[Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>]

Quoting Alan Davis (alan3davis@gmail.com):

> I refer to the Epson ET-4750.

As you know (but for collective knowledge), this is an 'all-in-one' (aka
multifunction) device:  It includes printer functionality, plus scanner,
fax, and in-a-pinch photocopier functions.  The printing engine is
inkjet.


I have some personal opinions on the shopping involved, which of course
doesn't help you at the moment but I'll mention it pro bono publico.

1.  All-in-one devices have always seemed unusually problematic, even 
though there's nothing inherently wrong with the concept.  I would
always avoid buying them.

2.  I would also avoid buying inkjet except for very specialised
applications.  The economics of supplying them with ink is inevitably 
not good (very high cost per page), and the manufacturers seem to 
be strongly attracted to secret-sauce proprietary protocols and
techniques.  

I would usually gravitate towards a printer (that is not also a scanner,
etc.) based on a popular, robust laser or LED print engine, that has 
or can be fitted with an ethernet port, and that accepts the PCL and/or
PostScript print control languages.  (If I also needed a scanner, I'd
get a separate best-of-breed scanner.)

Back to your device:


The Epson EcoTank ET-4750 understands the 'ESC/P-R' print control
language that is proprietary to Epson.  It doesn't do PCL or PostScript
printing.

The Epson EcoTank ET-4750 accepts print jobs via any of these three connection
methods:

o  USB
o  direct WiFi submission
o  wired ethernet

To me, that choice is a no-brainer.  I'd go wired ethernet.  (Direct WiFi
is in my experience a particularly bad choice, ripe for problems and
difficult to diagnose.)


The Epson EcoTank ET-4750 has a built-in Web server for access to its
internal configuration functions and for printing out test pages, etc.
They call this the 'Web Config' functionality.  However, you can also
configure many (all?) of the settings via the printer's 'control panel'
and what I would guess is an LCD small screen.

Here's the product manual:
https://files.support.epson.com/docid/cpd5/cpd53997.pdf


Here is discussion at the Linux Mint forums about getting printing and
scanning going to an ET-4750.  Notice the reference to some secret-sauce
Epson files one can download for CUPS (printing) and SANE (scanning)
stuff.  https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=264758

TurboPrint has a for-pay proprietary print driver for the ET-4750:
https://www.turboprint.info/printer_Epson_EcoTank_ET4750.html
(Developers of proprietary drivers can get secret-sauce information from
the manufacturer under NDA, while coders of open-source drivers cannot.
This is one reason why it's in your interest to avoid secret-sauce
hardware to the extent possible.)

Likewise, VueScan, which is a for-pay proprietary alternative to SANE, 
has drivers that vendor Hamrick Software developed:
https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/epson_et_4750.html 

The OpenPrinting page about the ET-4750 doesn't say much, but this page
covers the downloadable CUPS driver you can download from Epson, which
driver is called epson-escpr (because it outputs the ESC/P-R print
control language).
http://www.openprinting.org/driver/epson-escpr

But I'm gathering that some distros make the epson-escpr CUPS driver
available as a distro package.  For example, Ubuntu provides it as
package printer-driver-escpr in the 'Universe' package collection.


Hope that helps.  But, next time, consider eschewing all-in-ones and
inkjets.  (Here endeth the sermon.)

> Since that time, I was able to scan a document with the native Epson tool
> "utsushi". However, neither gscan2pdf nor simple-scan detected the
> scanner.  Even when simple-scan was run as root, no luck was to be had.

Epson was able to build the secret sauce into utsushi.


> I plan to edit the config files of sane and the bizaare driver from Epson
> that Epson will not support.  Maybe if the hardware issue is suspected I
> will contact Epson Support.

They will say they dige no technical support for Linux, if you mention
Linux.  (So, if you intend to assert a hardware defect, I'd recommend
avoiding mentioning Linux if possible.


> My apologies, and my thanks.  

Yr. very welcome, and best of luck to you.

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