Right, having cleaned the printer, which had leaked ink (see other post) and cleaned the work area I am trying to get it working again.

I have an old iMac running macOS 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and the aforementioned HP DeskJet 840C printer. I print “wirelessly” from a more modern iMac under Catalina v10.15.3 (19D76) to the Snow Leopard machine which is connected to the printer via a USB cable.

On a previous old iMac this arrangement worked just fine using one of the Gutenberg drivers (I think) but, alas, i cannot remember which version. I no longer own that iMac but I do still have access to it should that be the way forward,

I have now connected another old iMac to the network and, when I tried to print, it returned the advice that there were no drivers and that the automated search of Apple found none. This is what I expected, of course.

I then went to Gutenberg and downloaded usbtb-1.0.17.uni.dmg as advised on the Mac paragraph and installed the driver.

Both iMacs can now see the printer but when I print a test page from either of them I get one page showing:

% I PS-Adobe-3.0 % APL_DCS_Encoding: UTF8 % APLProducer: (Version 10.6.8 (Build 10K549 …

The text runs across the A4 Portrait page but at each % symbol the text drops down a line. There may be further text after the Build number but it would be off the paper.

The submitted test page fails to print and the printer just spews out blank pages ad nauseam until I turn off the printer, seemingly the only way to stop it.

Am I using the correct driver from Gutenberg?

Is there any thing I can copy off the other iMac which did work and, if so, just what and where would I find it?

Is there another source of drivers which would solve my problem?

If you can offer any advice I would be most grateful.

Thanks in advance.


iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017); 3.8 GHz Intel Core i5; 2TB HD; 64 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 RAM; Radeon Pro 580 8 GB. iPad Pro 10.5" Model MPME2B/A with 512GB capacity; iPhone SE 2020 256GB