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

[Michael Wenk]

On Sunday 01 February 2004 01:09 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 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

Are you sure when you print to bitmap that its really printing PCL?  On the 4 
series printeres(4si/4si MX) all graphics were sent as PS rather than PCL.  
Do you have multiple systems managing the printer?  Also, as I recall, there 
should be a way to dump the PS error log and see what is happening... (You 
could on a 4si via one of the menus) 

Mike

-- 
wenk@praxis.homedns.org
Mike Wenk