From: "Nij" <nigel@mwords.co.uk> Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 23:12:15 +0100 Yes, almost certainly, unless the driver you are referring to is 'specialist' and actively checks the printer to see what it identifies itself as. The command sets for 1290 and 1270 are VERY similar, and as far as I could tell when i last looked (a little while ago now) the 1290 only extended certain commands... it did not change any command structures substantially. Why not try it? To the best of my knowledge, that's true: any print file that will work on the 1270 should work identically on the 1290. If you do have a driver that insists on checking, try printing to a file, and then spooling the raw file; the driver can't "check" that. Personally, I can't see how a printer could be damaged by use of the incorrect driver. As far as I can tell, the printers have just enough intelligence not to try and print 13" wide, for example, if it is only an 8.x" printer. But of course, don't come running to me if something does go wrong ;) There are two ways I can think of that there might be some amount of damage caused by a driver: 1) A bug in the driver that causes it to not emit any vertical feed commands would just keep laying down ink on the same spot (but this would be an outright bug in the driver, because all Epson printers require vertical feed commands). 2) Using a driver for some old-style printers (such as the Stylus Color) on others (such as the Photo EX) in certain resolutions (particularly 720 DPI). Some very old printers support firmware weave ("microweave"), but others don't; if you print using microweave to a printer that doesn't handle it correctly, it will only use one nozzle, and aside from being deathly slow it might lead to head clogs. Those are extreme cases; in general the worst result will usually be either garbage or the paper being ejected without printing anything. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu> http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/ Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print/stp -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.