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

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Sun 01 Feb 04,  5:36 PM, Michael Wenk <wenk@praxis.homedns.org> said:
> 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?

no, i'm not.  printers have always been a big mystery to me.  how would
you find out?

> 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?

no -- just linux.  but it gets shared by a bunch of different operating
systems.

> 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
 
for real?  i'll have to google for this.  that would be _really_ useful!

pete

-- 
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