Help with Printer Troubleshooting
 

I installed a Lexmark Printer which worked fine over the network. I installed it locally as a USB printer. It uses drivers that were available online. (Lexmark z600 series). No problems.

I printed several jobs today. I had two soccer forms to print for my daughter. Printed the first one. Fine. Printed the second one. Nothing.

Turns out the raster filter (under foomatic) has failed.

Specifically, the error is: /usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertoz600 failed

I was hoping someone could help me troubleshoot this. I'm not sure where to start since it worked fine one minute and was concked out the next. I've tried reinstalling the printer, CUPS, foomtic, and nothing will get past it.

I'd be happy to post a log portion of you can tell me what would be helpful.

Some history:
I tried getting an HP to work (the system is Ubuntu Dapper) and could not (though it worked "plugnplay" on my laptop running Edgy).

I tried updating CUPS and foomatic manually (by installing from source, since the Dapper repos don't have the latest versions).

Long story short...I never got the HP to work. That's why I plugged the Lexmark in. And it worked fine until I hit print on the next document and that was it.

I appreciate whatever help others have to offer.


Mark

What program are you using?

What kind of data are you using in the forms? Is it a Word document with a large table or Excel spreadsheet?

With some PDF files, I have problems printing some pages on my Brother HL-5140 laser printer. In the printer settings for Adobe Reader, I had to select image file instead of PCL. It then printed it just fine. You can do the same by printing it to a file and then use gv or use lp or lpr whatever works best for you to print the ps file.

Since the manufacture is writing software for this model, send them detail information about the error.

Well, as it turns out that seems to have something to do with it. It seems that the printer won't print this particular PDF file directly. It prints from Open Office just fine! It also printed a different PDF just fine.

Seems to me that --does this sound correct?-- that postscript items go through the foomatic filters while the WYSIWYG printouts are spooled/delivered to the printer some other way?

How do I trace this odd behavior and fix it?

Thanks for pointing me in a good direction here.

Every print out goes through the filters to create data that the printer accepts. Blame Adobe to not confining their output to postscript rules. It happens to a lot of printers even in Windows and probably MAC.

Programs that uses the PPD file located in /etc/cups/ppd should print just fine. Other programs like Adobe Reader may need to be change to convert the output to an image instead of using PCL commands for printing.

Actually it doesn't work in Evince either (which I use more than Adobe). So, something with PS is not getting through properly.

But again, I did print a PDF that worked. The next one didn't. I don't see any real difference in the files, both have text and graphics.

Is there some PS thing that's not working somewhere?

Thanks for helping troubleshoot!