Strange printing error on Slack 13.1 w/ HP Photosmart printer.
 

Hey all, I'm running Slackware 13.1 64-bit, and have an HP Photosmart C4780 all-in-one printer. I've gotten the printer properly installed from HPLIP, and it detects things just fine and reacts when given the command to print. But has trouble printing anything from word processors or the like.

It allows me to do printing jobs from the web (ie; printing a web page or photo from a link), but does not print from KWord at all. I've also tried Okular and X PDF to no avail. I did a printing test when re-running 'hp-setup', and it printed everything just fine, full colour and all. However, when I try to print a .pdf or .odt document, it just prints out blank sheets of paper. Notifications come up telling me when it starts and finishes printed, and does not report any error.

Any ideas on this? This has me totally stumped, and I need to get some reports printed before soon. Any help would be much appreciated.

Can you print a test page?

I found this at the HP site. I suggest seeing Note 13 at the bottom of the page and following the link. I don't currently have a Slackware System to test with, but it might tell you something:

http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web...00_series.html

Yes, it printed a test page with a few lines, a multicolored sphere, and the HP logo with no issues.

It seems that I have all of the dependencies, and I was using that same page recently to do the initial installation of the printer. As said, the laptop and printer interact with no problems, it's just that the printer keeps shooting out blank sheets.

To make it print from all apps, go to the cups config page http://localhost:631/ and set the printer as the default printer.

As for printing blank pages, I don't know what that might be caused by. Any errors reported ? see the cups page as well.

@H_TeXMeX_H: Thanks for the link, and I got the printer to be set as the default. Also, the test page I requested on the CUPS page printed successfully. No errors are reported, a tab at the bottom of the screen even pops up to tell me something like "The document has been printed successfully."

It's still only giving me blank sheets for all of the aforementioned software, though. If anyone has ideas, I'll try it.

This is a reach, but do you have another computer that you could connect to the printer directly and test printing from Open Office and other word processing programs?

That would tell us definitely whether the problem is in the printer or in the Slackware computer.

The odds are that it's in the computer, but certainty is always a good thing in shooting trouble.

@frankbell: Yes, my father has an older laptop with Windows Vista on it, and it can print an MS Word document just fine.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I think it might be a driver issue, try updating hplip and/or cups.

I re-installed through HPLIP very recently, and I went through the CUPS installation yesterday.

Thanks for the tip though.