Flutterby™! : Printer Frustrations

Note to self: Next time you see a "you really should install..." note, but discover that things work, you might want to really install whatever it was. In particular this was installing CUPS on Charlene's desktop machine, and thinking that because we were getting reasonable output from her HP Deskjet 960c that everything was fine. But I recently tried to print out some photos and was getting horrible resolution, everything looked like a really bad newspaper dither pattern. Installing the HPIJS driver, and then using the OpenOffice.org Printer Administration facility to import the PPD file from /etc/cups/ppd/*.ppd has turned this from a reasonable word processing machine to a photo-printing monster.