Earlier this week I bought a printer for the new project I'm working on. A big, bad-ass OKI 9800 A3 color printer for the price of a small car -- not my money -- the client's money ;-).

Since we're a Mac-only shop here, I made sure it's got postscript3 and ethernet, so that connectivity wouldn't be a problem. Well, it was. Of course. Long story short: if we used the offical, OKI supplied PPD, the printer wouldn't print. It only could be coaxed into printing when using the generic postscript PPD -- which of course knew nothing about the A3 paper size or any of the other nifty features.

After spending three days(!) with the OKI hotline (spent mainly with re-stating our problem and configuration to various operators) I finally hit gold. In the form of a friendly, competent and female(!) operator (Hallo, Frau Walther!) who didn't just resort to OKI's ticket database but (gasp!) to her memory. She actually remembered a similar case a while back, told me to hold, came back 30 seconds later and ever since we're able to print here!

Turns out, that OKI has been delivering a faulty PPD - ever since march 2005! In the end it's just a single % character that's missing. I have to ask myself: WTF did they not update that file? Anyway, I'm posting this so that any other fellow OKI users can find this (because until now googling for the error Missing filter "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 fierycupsfilter" didn't deliver any results. Hopefully, this will have changed).

Below you can find a diff of the the PPD or, for your convenience, you can download a patched version right here from tomster.org.

@@ -2947,5 +2947,5 @@

 *% PPD Last Modified 2005.03.10
 *% OS 10.2 PPD DB version 4/10/03 JDF
-*cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 fierycupsfilter"
+*% cupsFilter: "application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 fierycupsfilter"
 *% End of PPD file