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Printing onto CD with Canon Pixma IP4200 and Ubuntu linux

8 February 2008

Back in November I posted to the Ubuntu Forums, that although normal printing from linux worked fine to my Canon PIXMA IP4200, I was unable to print directly onto printable CDs. At the time I thought this may be a problem with communication between the OS and the printer.

Unusually I didn't get a reply on the forum (perhaps because the US version does not include the print CD feature, so there are less users). I have now found the fix myself.

Through some trial and error I found that the print was being sent to the normal paper tray rather than the CD printer. With the CD tray is open it doesn't print but instead waits on user input. I then realised that the reason for this was due to the selection of the Media Type in the printer driver.

The printer driver needs the following options to be set:

I have also created a template that can be used with OpenOffice.org Draw, to print onto the CD.
The only thing with this is that it does not print to the very edge of the CD. It does what I need, but if you want to be able to print over the entire CD then you may have to adjust the settings using the CD-Custom option in the printer driver. If anyone does find these settings, please post details, but I didn't want to keep wasting CDs for testing it.

OpenOffice.org draw template for Canon Pixma (iP4200) printers

If you'd rather use the printer drivers from Canon see below:

Using Canon provided Linux drivers for the Canon Pixma iP4200 printer

Now Ubuntu includes Gutenprint drivers this is not required, and in fact the Canon drivers I tried before did not support the Print to CD option anyway.

Epson printers

If you have an Epson printer see the following link: