{"id":1486,"date":"2019-11-23T11:19:41","date_gmt":"2019-11-23T16:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.devolve.net\/?p=1486"},"modified":"2019-11-23T11:19:41","modified_gmt":"2019-11-23T16:19:41","slug":"printing-to-unsupported-brother-printer-from-chromebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/printing-to-unsupported-brother-printer-from-chromebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Printing to unsupported Brother printer from Chromebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was trying to get a printer set up on a Chromebook and after looking through its list for the right model, it wasn’t there. It suggested I give it a PPD file. After some searching, I learned that you can find some compressed PPD files if you download the right Postscript Windows driver from the Brother support site.
\n<\/p>\n

So the model I’m looking for is MFC-L3750CDW. That led me to the specific driver download page for that printer<\/a>. Next, go down to the drivers section and click the Show all<\/strong> button to hopefully get a few more options. That’s where I found the BR-Script driver that contains PPDs. Thankfully, a regular unzip utility will decompress the EXE file.<\/p>\n

In the extracted directory, we now have a collection of compressed PPD files for many models. On my Mac, I ran the file command on the one file which looked appropriate.<\/p>\n

$ file brpml3750cdw.pp_
\nbrpml3750cdw.pp_: MS Compress archive data, SZDD variant, d is last character of original name, original size: 30617 bytes<\/code><\/p>\n

I had to spend some time figuring out how to decompress this file. The Unarchiver<\/strong> and 7-Zip<\/strong> don’t appear to support it, most likely due to intellectual property issues. However, I did have WINE installed, and wondered if it would help. It did! The correct utility is expand.exe<\/strong> and it exists in the WINE directory.<\/p>\n

$ wine ~\/.wine\/drive_c\/windows\/system32\/expand.exe brpml3750cdw.pp_ brpml3750cdw.ppd<\/code><\/p>\n

Next, I just had to share the file via Google Drive to the Chromebook user and then finished installing the driver. Finally, I successfully printed a couple documents from the Chromebook.<\/p>\n

Since I already had WINE installed it was convenient for me to use its expand.exe. However, if you don’t already have it or don’t want it, I read that you can install Dosbox and copy the expand.exe from a Windows system into it, although I haven’t tried it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was trying to get a printer set up on a Chromebook and after looking through its list for the right model, it wasn’t there. It suggested I give it a PPD file. After some searching, I learned that you can find some compressed PPD files if you download the right Postscript Windows driver from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1487,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[34,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1488,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1486\/revisions\/1488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.devolve.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}