Printer frustration

[Michael Wiktowy]

Greetings,

I have a printer (HP 3845) that magically installed as soon as I
plugged it in. This was great and it represented the end of my good
feelings towards CUPS/HPLIP.

CUPS seems to only have a driver that is close (HP 3840) that works
mostly. I was trying to print mailing labels using glabels and the
printer and thing required precise printing positioning. But the
printer was insisting on leaving about 1/2" (7/16" to be precise) at
the top of the page before it started printing. This is not only an
unprintable zone (which I expect from all printers and the Avery
sheets compensate for by leaving a dead zone at the top before the
labels) but an actual offset to the printing coordinates.
Unsurprisingly, the labels didn't line up with the proper Avery
template in glabels. Surprisingly there didn't seem to be *anywhere*
where a manual correction could be applied to bring the printing
coordinates back to the top edge of the page.

I ended up working around the issue but remaking the glabels template
with the manual offset needed but this isn't a ideal long term
solution. After searching around I haven't found an good answer online
on how to manually adjust this setting for all printing. I did find a
lot of people haveing the same issue with a lot of different printers.

Does anyone have a better solution than building a new PPD file from
scratch (something I have no idea how to do at the moment)? This seems
like it should be a simple task ...

Thanks,
/Mike