Canon ipf Printer Doesn’t Work in OSX Leopard. My Workaround and Fix

Note: The post below describes a workaround for the broken ipf driver. Thankfully, I have finally found a real fix that did not require the workaround below. I have decided to leave the post up because it may help somebody else and because it is a review of Canon’s service of the imageProGraf printers. The link to the final fix is at the bottom

After nearly six months Canon has finally given us a 10.5 Leopard Driver for the ipf ImageProGraph Printers. In true Canon IPF Support fashion, this driver is also broken. I have been on the phone with tech support and invested nearly 10 more hours trying to figure this out. I have faxed them numerous logs, they have their software engineers on it, and still nothing (if you’re wondering, the firmware updater works, the ps print plugin works, and the UI works, so this is not a problem with my “setup” or network. Their driver is junk). I am going to leave all my posts criticizing Cannon’s support of the products on my website, because I believe the people who are considering buying an Canon Large Format Printer should know what type of service to expect from Canon. Honestly, if I were going to purchase a large format printer I would look to Epson and HP (not just because of this but because of my nearly two years of experience with Canon support). Here is a link to the IPF8000 Leopard 10.5 driver that is broken….

If you have not purchased a Canon ipf Printer yet, you should consult this PixelsAndSuch Review of Canon’s Support of Wide-Format Printers, before you buy. If you have an ipf printer, I hope this helps.

I recently upgraded to Mac OSX Leopard 10.5 only to find out that I can no longer print with my Canon ipf8000 printer. Apparently Apple changed the way that printing is handled under Leopard and this affected the Canon ipf drivers, Photoshop 16-bit plugins, and GARO Print Software (the Print Utility in Leopard is different than in Tiger). Canon customer service confirmed this problem (updated information is here) and did not give a date as to when they would be releasing upgraded software. This means that some people with a ipf5000, ipf5100, ipf6000, ipf6100, ipf8000, ipf8100, ipf9000, and ipf9100 Large Format Printer can’t print with Leopard. In my case, this affected all programs including Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and I suspect Apple Aperture. I have seen reports where some ipf owners managed to get the ipf software to work with Leopard. Hopefully, you’re one of those lucky ones.

My experience with my ipf8000 and Canon is that the support for Canon Wide Format Printers has lagged far behind what is should for a $5500 printer. And although I have been a critic of Canon’s support of the ipf8000 in the past, in this case, I can excuse Canon for not having all the drivers ready. I have heard that Epson and HP have had similar problems with their printers not working with Leopard, either. Nevertheless, I already upgraded all my macs to Leopard and I needed a workaround so I didn’t lose money in my digital image printing business waiting for Canon to release updated ipf driver and Photoshop plugin software, which could be months away.

For the most part, the workaround below was the same for my MacBook Pro and my dual processor G5 PPC (note: this is not an Intel processor mac). The MacBook Pro was upgraded with Leopard and the G5 got an erase and install of Leopard.

Canon ipf Leopard fixes that didn’t work

I attempted to reinstall the ipf Printer Driver 3.60 multiple times. I requested the most recent version from Canon-USA, downloaded the versions of the drivers on the Canon European download site, and went back to the first version of Canon Garo software that came with my ipf8000. The drivers would install but the installation was incomplete and print jobs never made it to my printer. I figured I would try the Canon Photoshop Plugin, and got similar results. After extensive testing, I realized that the only way I was going to be able to print to my ipf8000 was to print with Tiger. I did not want to go back and downgrade both my macs to Tiger in order to print to my ipf printer, as I had already invested too much time upgrading them to Leopard.

The only alternative was to create a mac with both Leopard and Tiger on it, which left me with two choices.

Install Tiger on a Second Hard Drive

This was my first choice and the route that I went. Luckily I had an additional empty drive in my G5 that I used as a Photoshop swap drive. If you don’t have two internal drives in your mac, you can load Tiger on an external firewire drive and make a dual boot Leopard and Tiger mac that way.

Install Tiger on a Partition on a Leopard Drive

You can also have a dual boot mac with Tiger and Leopard by partitioning your single hard drive into two partitions and installing Tiger on the new partition. I did not use this fix, so I am not going to discuss how to do it here. You basically use Disk Utility to make a new partition and tell the Tiger installer to put Tiger on that new partition. You better understand what you are doing with partitions before you start partitioning your mac hard drives or you might just wipe everything! I believe after you have a mac with two partitions, you can follow the directions in the next section.

PixelsAndSuch.com takes no responsibility if something happens to your mac or these directions don’t work for you. We encourage you to make a backup of any critical data before you start.

Setting Up a Dual Boot Tiger Leopard Mac

1. With Leopard installed on your machine, boot your mac with the Tiger installation CD’s (you may have to hold the C key down while starting your mac).
2. Follow the installation instructions for Tiger. I chose NOT to do an “easy install’ (default install), so that Tiger did not install dozens of unnecessary software packages (it’s much faster this way, too). All you need here is a bootable Tiger drive. Watch the install menus for chances to customize the Tiger install and uncheck the software you don’t need.
3. Complete the Install. Remove the Tiger CD and restart your machine.
4. In order to display the mac bootloader, which gives you the choice between booting from Tiger or booting from Leopard, hold down the option key when starting the mac.
5. Chose to boot into Tiger.
6. You do NOT need to reinstall Photoshop on the Tiger disk if you have it on the Leopard disk already.
7. Start Photoshop CS2 or Photoshop CS3, whichever you have, by going to the Leopard disk and starting it from there.
8. You will most likely see the Adobe SpaceMonkey Splash page and you will get a warning that Photoshop doesn’t like something you are doing. You will need to go to the /Library/Application_Support/ directory on your Leopard Drive, and copy the “Adobe,” “Adobe_PDF” and “Adobe Systems” and paste them in the same directory in your Tiger drive (you may not need all these folders, but I didn’t take the time to figure out which ones I needed and which I didn’t). When you start photoshop, you will get some complaining from the Adobe Updater, but you can click through them. If you need to update Photoshop CS3 (or CS2), just do it by going directly to the Adobe download website.
9. Install the drivers, photoshop plugin, and other Garo Software like you normally would in Tiger.
10. If your monitor is color profiled - I use an X-rite Pantone Eye-One Display 2, you’ll need to copy your current profile from the Leopard drive (most likely in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles or a subfolder) to your Tiger hard drive (same location). You can then chose it in the System Preferences/Displays/Colors).
11. I also found it helpful to download and install the Wacom driver for my Graphire Tablet on the Tiger disk also.

When will Canon Update the ipf Drivers?

That’s the 6 million pixel question so to speak. I hope it is sometime in early 2008. I have been printing with this workaround on my ipf8000 and it has worked exactly as you would expect in Tiger. At the same time it is annoying.

Tags: Canon, drivers, dual-boot mac, Garo, ipf, ipf8000, Leopard, Photography, Tiger, upgrading