Bug#1018265: Info received (Bug#1018265 closed by Brian Potkin <claremont102@gmail.com> (cups picks manual tray on HP Color LaserJet M252dw))

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

To summarize for a future googler that ends up here.

The printer in question is an HP Color LaserJet from 2014, with dual
sided printing and colour.  The printer has an onboard NIC and natively
supports PostScript and IPP.

Windows PCs and iDevices can print directly to this network printer and
do not need to use the CUPS printer, so there is no need to export the
printer from CUPS.

Tip: it might be an idea to lock the printer's MAC addres to a fixed
IPv4 address in your router's DHCP server (otherwise you may have to
reinstall the printer on windows machines, because windows printer
drivers are locked to a particular IP address and stops working if the
printer gets a new address).

With CUPS it is possible to use two drivers for this printer
 1. "driverless"[1] (part of the cups-filters-core-drivers package[2])
 2. "hplip"[3]

To summarize:
 1. The driverless driver sort, of, kind of works, but doesn't support
    PostScript and sometimes picks the wrong tray (the manual feed
    slot), and there is no way to select what tray to use. But colour
    and dual sided printing both works
 2. The hplip driver works, lets you select the tray and prints dual
    sided.  But the hplip printer doesn't print colour from a webkit
    based browser (chromium and vivaldi on my debian system).  The hplip
    printer prints colour fine from the Atril PDF viewer, from firefox
    and from libreoffice 

The driverless driver builds and regenerates the PPD from the networked
printer itself.  So any edits you try to make to the PPD is overwritten
(I found an edit of the tray names in the PPD when googling for similar
problems and found out that the edit I tried to make just disappeared).

The driverless printer installs itself, sort of.  Or at least it
reinstalls itself when deleted, once installed.

On my computer the driverless printer shows up in printer dialogs, as:
 HP_Color_LaserJet_Pro_M252dw_501595_

The hplip driver shows up in printer dialogs, as:
 HP_Color_LaserJet_Pro_M252dw

The installation of the hplip printer was as follows:
 1. Clicked on "Find New Printer"
 2. 3 printers appeared:
    1. Virtual Braille BRF Printer (CUPS-BRF)
    2. Hewlett-Packard HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw (Hewlett-Packard HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw (driverless))
    3. HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw (HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw)
 3. Clicked on "Add This Printer" next to "HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw (HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw)"
 4. Added name, description and location
 5. Under "Make" selected "HP" and clicked "Continue"
 6. Under "Model" there were 13 lines of "HP Color LaserJet PRO M252 Postscript (recommended) (en)"
 7. Selected the first to the 13 lines and clicked on "Add Printer"
 8. Changed "Printer Options" from
      | Media size | Letter    |
      | Two-sided  | off       |
      | Paper feed | Automatic |
    to
      | Media size | A4                |
      | Two-sided  | Long-edge binding |
      | Paper feed | Automatic         |
 9. Seleced the tab "Options Installed" and switched "Duplex Unit" to "on"
10. Clicked "Set Default Options"


References
 [1] <https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting>
 [2] <https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/cups-filters-core-drivers>
 [3] <https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/hplip>