When I first installed the drivers everything worked fine then one day it just started this. Also it prints very slowly too, and it's low quality. I checked all the obvious settings and then reinstalled the hplip drivers from the website. Any ideas?

Have you checked the print options for your printer to see what quality it is printing at? This may have accidentally been changed.

You haven't supplied any information on which distro or desktop environment you are using so I can't tell you how to access those settings. I assume you know how to do that.

Thanks. I'm using Ubuntu 16.04. And I've checked the printer settings in the HP device manager but I don't know anywhere else to check settings

Ok, your desktop environment's control panel would probably just take you to the HP device manager anyway.

What setting values does it list?

Have you any other device running any other operating system from which you can print to the printer so that we can narrow down whether the problem is on the Linux or printer end?

Yes, it works under windows



http://img-cdn.filefactory.com/embed...458alnwwgn.png


can you use [img] to display images in here?

I saw something about "Ghostscript" in another thread, so I reinstalled that thing whatever it is in synaptic manager but that didn't help. Don't know if I did it right. Just selected the already installed files and selected "reinstall" which apparently completed.

Ok. While I have a think about this, and hoping that someone more knowledgeable than me can chip in with some advice, can you think if there was anything at all that changed with your system or the printer between the last time it worked correctly and when it stopped doing so?

Also, can you confirm that you only have one HP printer listed in the Printers/Printing section (I don't know much about Unity, but it should be under the "Hardware" section in Unity's Control Centre).

Thanks. Interesting you should ask and there was another of the same printer listed, slightly different name I forgot but I deleted it but it hasn't made a difference. It was also set for color printing. As far as anything changing, definitely something could have between those two days as I was doing a lot with my computer but I can't recall exactly. It's already too late now to remember, but at the time when I first noticed this, I remember it was strange that that morning suddenly it stopped printing in color and I couldn't recall at the time what I'd done if anything.

oh, and I don't know what unity is.

If you're using straight Ubuntu (not one of the variants such as Kubuntu and Lubuntu), then Unity is the desktop environment that you're using.

Ok. It's beyond my ken, particularly if you've reinstalled hplip (did you completely uninstall it first before reinstalling)? The uninstallation instructions I still have from when I had an HP printer are:

(first cd to the directory where you copied the temp folder when you installed hplip - in my case it was ~/bin/hplip)
sudo make uninstall
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/hplip
sudo rm -rf /etc/hp
sudo rm -rf ~/.hplip
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/hp
(now remove the folder mentioned above - in my case ~/bin/hplip)

If you didn't copy the temp folder anywhere when you installed hplip, reinstall hplip and this time do so before carrying out the above. The temp folder is usually called something like hplip-3.16.3 and you will notice it in the same directory after after you've run the hplip installer.

However, *please don't do this if* you're in any way uncomfortable with the command line, you plan to type the commands in rather than copy-pasting them, or you haven't very recently made a backup of your system.

I didn't consciously copy any folders anywhere when I installed it. So you're saying to install again just to make the temp folder THEN uninstall? Is this the easiest way to uninstall something on this system? Thanks

Yup. :-) I know it sounds ridiculous, but those instructions were adapted straight from the horse's mouth: http://hplipopensource.com/node/188

No, that's not the easiest way to uninstall something on the system. Usually your package manager will take care of things. But if you install hplip manually, then you have to play by their rules.

got it. thanks. i'll figure this out eventually. back at it now...

so I solved it, how, idk exactly, but as shown in the pic I installed all these instances of hplip, where the only one installed before was the first one. Were these supposed to be installed before, idk. I just took a shot in the dark and got lucky. Anyone know what happened and why it works now but didn't before please enlighten me as I hate solving problems ignorantly as it means should it occur again I won't have the knowledge to fix it again necessarily.

http://img-cdn.filefactory.com/embed...z4sf3y7iv3.png

juntjoo,

Counting from the top of your screenshot, I do NOT have the following hplip packages installed for my HP printer:

1,4,5,6,11.

The remaining 7 items are the same.

Thanks for the feedback. If anyone else runs into this issue hopefully this thread will amount to something useful.