Background
Dell 1660w Linux Printer Drivers & Ubuntu 18.04
Having owned a Dell 1660w printer for some years, I have found it annoying that there seems to be no official Dell Linux drivers. Dell Windows & OSX users are well catered for but, that does not help if you have a device running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Experimenting with various options I was lead to the following page http://foo2hbpl.rkkda.com/ stating to use a Coffin’s HBPL Version 1 driver Dell 1660w, but this lead to a dead link.
Fortunately, a foresighted individual managed to get hold of the sources code of Coffin’s HBPL Version 1 driver and it can be found here https://github.com/mikerr/foo2zjs. The installation instructions worked well, and I could setup the printer in CUPS. However, when it came to printing, the following error in the (/usr/log/cups/error_log) was thrown:
foo2hbpl1-wrapper: Unimplemented paper code 1 error
Googling this error lead me to the following this article where the Dell-c1660.ppd file used number parameters in this case (-p1 for A4) to send information about the paper size to the foo2hbpl1-wrapper, and not the paper string e.g. A4|A5 itself. I have created a new fork [https://github.com/Shinbar/foo2zjs/tree/shinbar/dev2020/papersize] and amended the problem file foo2hbpl1-wrapper.in so it can now uses number parameters, or paper strings parameters. Following the INSTALL instructions:
make clean sudo make uninstall make sudo make install sudo make cups
It is now possible to print from my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distro to my Dell 1660w printer. I have also requested that this change be pull requested into the original branch.
Conclusion
In the meantime if your’e unable to wait for this to be included into the original branch use [https://github.com/Shinbar/foo2zjs/tree/shinbar/dev2020/papersize] and follow the install instructions.