[vox-tech] postscript printer: light goes on, nobody home.

[Peter Jay Salzman]

hi all,

i have an HP laserjet 6MP.  it works great on linux.  it's shared with
other linux and windows systems.  no problems.

well, almost no problems.

every blue moon, i'll queue something with lpr, and the printer LEDs
will flash like they normally do to indicate "i'm receiving data".

but after the data gets trasfered to the printer, the "data LED" and
"ready LED" will remain on.  my printer manual says this state is
called:

    "data is in the printer memory (form feed)"

and says to press the "go button" to start printing.  i hit the "go
button", but nothing prints.

eventually, the data LED goes out indicating the printer is in the
"ready for printing" state.  the job is gone.

it's like the printer receives data but just gives up on printing it.
this happens on all the operating systems in the house: debian, suse,
redhat, win2k and win98.

has anybody seen this happen before?  any guesses as to what causes it?

the only thing i can think of is perhaps a flaw in the postscript or
perhaps the printer's postscript interpreter.

it'll happen to me once every 2 weeks - 1 month, so it's pretty
infrequent. i can get around it by "printing" whatever i want to an
bitmap file, and using gimp to print the file.  but that's kind of a
rotten way to do things, and the quality stinks compared to nice raster
postscript.

pete

-- 
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