Suddenly can't print pdf files
 

I can no longer print pdf files. I can print other file formats but not pdf. I was able to print pdf files up until today. The only change today was the Etch update of bsdutils, mount and util-linux packages. These updates were done on my main computer with two printers connected. The updates were not done to my laptop, also running Etch, but I am also no longer able to print pdf files from that machine, networked to the main Etch machine. Setting up for debug logging hasn't given me a clue. Any ideas?
Thanks.

One possible culprit is the pdftops program. Check to see if pdftops is not installed or is broken. You can try:

which pdftops
man pdftops

Check synaptic to see the status of the poppler-utils package and to get a description of poppler-utils.

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Steve Stites

Thanks. pdftops is installed. Working? If I print to file from xpdf, it creates a .ps file which won't print. The error log entry is the same or very similar. I have used pdftops to convert a pdf file to ps and the result will not print.

poppler-utils is not installed. I did an apt-get install -s poppler-utils and the system wants to remove xpdf and xpdf-utils, so I did not do that.

I should mention that two days ago I printed two pdf files from xpdf and one of the two from gpdf.

Today, I can not print pdf files from kpdf on a second laptop with FreeBSD installed (networked to the Debian box and the same printers), and it does have poppler installed. However, I have never printed pdf files from this laptop before.

You could use the evince program to look at the ps files. Check if they are garbage. I think that you can also use evince to try and print ps files.

Are you using cups? I assume so. Check /var/spool/cups and see if the ps files are landing on the spool. In the past I have had print blockages which I unjammed by deleting everything on /var/spool/cups. However those jams were universal. The jams were not selective as to the original format such as pdf.

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Steve Stites

Thanks, again. I tried using evince to look at a ps file created with pdftops. It was blank. I ran evince in terminal mode and had lots of error messages. It seems that pdftops is part of cupsys so I reinstalled cupsys, along with cupsys-driver-gutenprint, printconf and cups-pdf as required by apt-get. No effect.

/var/spool/cups has many approx. 650 bit files listed with sequential names like c01020, c01021 ... I've used localhost:631 to purge the print jobs as I go along with my experiments and these files persist. Even with pdf and ps files backed up, I can print from OpenOffice and using lpr -P from all three machines.

If all else fails, I'll turn on the XP machine tomorrow and see if I can print from there via Samba. I'll need that capability anyway when we get to doing income taxes. It worked last year.

Thanks again.
Richard

It is a bug, http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=457810, that can be resolved by installing the xpdf-utils package. Note that aptitude will complain a bit about poppler-utils, but do it anyway. I did, and it solved the problem.

Thanks, but that bug is not the problem. xpdf-utils has always been installed. The problem seems to be that I tried to print some pdf files that will ONLY print using Acrobat. Somehow, trying to print those files prevented printing of older files which had previously printed with xpdf. I installed Acrobat after I was able to print the new files from my XP box, via Samba. After that, the old files printed in xpdf as before for some unknown reason. I will use Acrobat for files from that one new source and xpdf for everything else. Thanks, again.

For what it's worth I too have suddenly found I can't print pdfs that I could print before. I have managed to print one small file which was created with ooo but larger files don't seem to work. My work around has been to install acrobat, which does print. I sent an email to the Evince mailing list but no-one has taken it up yet. I run Fedora on a pc and laptop. Both are affected.

Jacek