Inkjet Plumber Available for Mac

[Jeff Thompson]

Hi, I've written a small utility program for the Mac named Inkjet Plumber. The utility will send a small print job to the printer(s) of your choosing at the interval (in hours) that you specify.

It will print small (0.5" x 0.5") color swatches in cyan, yellow, magenta, black, gray, light gray, red, green, and blue. Some additional textual information regarding the page and paper settings is included in the development releases to assist in debugging. I may keep or remove this in future versions, based on feedback, etc.

It is intended to be used by infrequent inkjet users that would like to exercise their printer automatically. Many Windows users use QImage for this very purpose, but I'm a Mac only user and couldn't find anything to do the same for the Mac, so I decided to create Inkjet Plumber.

The program is released under the GLP3 open source software license and is hosted on Github. If you're interested in downloading and testing/using it, I'd appreciate it.

The program is Mac only at this point, however, it's written using a cross-platform framework named Qt, so if there's interest I may be able to provide a Windows version in the future.

You may download the most recent release available from here.

Thanks

 

[turbguy]

I move that a Windows version be made available. Any second?

 

[The Hat]

@Jeff Thompson, that’s a great idea and thank you for coming up with something that might help hard pressed travellers, but you do realise that your program, just like QImage can potentially damage a Canon print head instead of actually helping to maintain it, and shouldn’t be used in any Canon printer.

All printers would benefit from regular exercise to prevent clogging up, but your idea of printing individual colours is not the answer, because a Canon printer won’t actually use every on board colour in the print head, that action can only be achieved with the aid of the standard nozzle check.

To utilise the use of individual colours, a RIP driver would be necessary but again this would only work for Epson printers because Canon printers can’t avail of any RIP drivers, so constantly printing your colour test chart daily/weekly unattended can cause the early death of a print head, if ink starvation happened to occur during such operations.

Alternatively, you could if you wish alter your utility program to make use the nozzle print instead of your Colour Swatch Test, exclusively for use in Canon printers only, then your program would be much safer to use for a Canon printer that is left unattended for long periods...

 

[Jeff Thompson]

@The Hat, I am not aware of the risk you describe. I'd be happy to initiate a Canon nozzle check instead of printing the color swatches, but I'm afraid I don't know how to do that...

If you have information you can share regarding how this would be accomplished, I'd be happy to try to implement it. Otherwise, any other suggestions you may have would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[The Hat]

To be able to use the Nozzle check in any batch file you first need to copy it from the print spooler while it’s still resident there, try this.

Run a nozzle check on any Canon printer and as soon as the printer starts up, click on View Printer status then Display the Print Queue, then pause the maintenance print file there in, if your too slow to catch it before it disappears then try printing another one, while the Print Queue box is still open.

Go to the print spooler and in there you’ll find an SPL. and SHD. file, now copy the SPL file and place it in the Batch file you have created to use it later, the old way was to use Windows Scheduler to run your made up batch file and your printer would print out the nozzle check whenever you wanted it too.

 

[Jeff Thompson]

I am a Mac only user. I tried to print a nozzle check for my Canon PIXMA Pro-100 and I am unable to catch it in the print queue. I don't even see it for a split second, so I wonder whether it's something Canon's utility sends directly to the printer bypassing the OS's print queue? Any ideas?

 

[The Hat]

I am a Mac only user. I tried to print a nozzle check for my Canon PIXMA Pro-100 and I am unable to catch it in the print queue. I don't even see it for a split second, so I wonder whether it's something Canon's utility sends directly to the printer bypassing the OS's print queue? Any ideas?

it’s been a while since I have printed anything out of a Mac, but I can recall that there was a section dealing with print job storing before they were used by the printer, I also had the choice to save any print job that was there to use at a later date, so one does exist..

 

[Jeff Thompson]

It sounds like you're describing the print dialog window where you can choose save as pdf and other options at the bottom left of the dialog. I can't use the print dialog box of course, it would defeat the purpose of the automated print...

I'll keep poking around, but nothing I've seen gives any indication that the Canon nozzle check utility actually flows through the OS's print queue.

 

[Vorkolor]

This is taken from the Canon-supplied Linux driver for the Pixma MG6650. It may or may not work on Mac, though OS X uses the same print system (CUPS) as GNU/Linux.

Create a two-line plain text file, make sure it's ASCII encoded (or Latin-whatever, or UTF-8, but not "ANSI" or UTF-anything else)

#CUPS-COMMAND
PrintSelfTestPage​

Print it from command line using the lpr command:

lpr nozzlecheck.txt​

This prints a nozzle check pattern on my printer.

 

[The Hat]

It sounds like you're describing the print dialog window where you can choose save as pdf and other options at the bottom left of the dialog. I can't use the print dialog box of course, it would defeat the purpose of the automated print...

It looks like I’ll have to poke around inside the Mac print setup to see if I can locate the tab for you, it’s not the print tab with save to PDF...
I'm off to watch some TV before bed..