I was trying to reproduce an A4 page of text by scanning it in grayscale with maximum resolution and then printing it. The file was about 4 MB in size. I couldn't print it either from the gimp or from geequie. The machine just seized up. Everything stopped and the image never reached the printing queue.

Just out of curiosity, I'd like to know what I ran out of: processing power or memory? I have a 4-core 2.41 GHz Intel Baytrail SoC and 4 GB of core.

4MB for an image is not much - there's no reason trying to print one should cause your computer to run out of anything.
(Though I'd also expect an A4 page scanned at maximum resolution to take up more space than that - how many pixels - i.e. width*height - and what file format was it?)

Also, if you were hitting any limits I'd expect some kind of log entries to say so - have you checked any yet?

Assuming there is some kind of bug preventing images from being printed, a possible workaround may be to OCR it and print the resulting text.


update: clarify "you" => "your computer"

It is possible that the printer ran out of memory for that file. you did not say what make / model the printer is so I cannot research that theory, but it is entirely possible.

Also, for printing images it is better to reduce the resolution of the scan if you want it on one page since the printer has a max resolution (dpi) as well, and when you send an image that is of higher resolution, something (I think the printer) has to reduce (interprolate) the image to what can actually be printed. Sometimes the image may be cut into 2 or 4 pages to use the original resolution depending upon what app is used to send it to the printer. Using print preview can tell you a lot at times.

Try opening the file with something like LO Writer or image viewer then print it

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There's nothing in messages or syslog. Cups shows a persistent error that looks like
but I've been getting that for months and it doesn't seem to have done any harm before.

I just printed a small png file out of geeqie and it printed with no problems.

@computersavvy. The printer is a Brother HL1110 B/W laser printer. Your explanation looks convincing to me. So you're saying it's not the size of the file that matters but whether the printer can handle the resolution. I used maximum resolution because I wanted a readable printout. What's a reasonable resolution for a scanned printed page then?

If the printer ran out of memory, I would expect the file to be stuck in the queue?

Saying "maximum resolution" tells us very little, beyond that it's probably a lot larger than it needs to be.

The key bit of information to know is: How many pixels did the scanner produce?

(Also useful to know is what file format did the scanner produce? i.e. TIF, TGA, JPG, BMP, etc)


For an A4 (210x297mm) sheet of paper, an 8 megapixel image (2480x3508px) will be plenty of detail - a smaller image could still be readable.

(Such a file could occupy less than 1MB as a JPG, or be 25MB as an uncompressed TIF or BMP.)

It was a jpg. I mentioned that in the title. Sadly I deleted the image in disgust, but I can always remake it. I'll try again tomorrow and see if I can supply the size information you want.

Your printer does 600 DPI, and so the scan should also be 600 DPI.

For a letter-size page, this produces a 5100x6600 image (33 megapixels). You should use the PNG format for scanned documents.

You may need to adjust the levels in Gimp so that white and black correspond to 255 and 0.
Ed

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Great! That gives me a lot to try out tomorrow. I'm too tired right now.

Also I've never really understood graphics. For example, I can't distinguish fonts or work up any preference for one font over another. I think that some people live through their eyes but I have always lived through my ears.

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Sorry, I somehow overlooked that.

If the image is converted to a bitmap when sent to the printer, a 4MB jpeg could end up as a ten times larger file, which might explain the issue.

Based on the specifications for your printer it appears to only have a 1MB memory (which seems really low; perhaps it is only a buffer), but if it runs out there's a light that flashes - if that's happening it would support what computersavvy said. (Though again I'd expect the file to still be in the print queue in that situation.)

Either way, reducing the image to 2480x3508px - or even 1204x1754px - should help. To put those numbers in perspective, the latter is roughly 6 pixels per millimeter - around twice as many as the screen in front of you is probably using.

If that still exhibits the problem (or isn't sharp enough for your needs) then perhaps look into Tesseract OCR to convert the image to text, (which will use very little memory and still print high resolution).


That would be 25 pixels per millimeter - which is far more than is needed for text! If the issue is due to excess printer or software memory use this would not help solve the problem.

(Also, letter-size is peculiar to the US; Hazel is in the UK.)

Hazel should first try 600 DPI, and if that does not work, then try 300 DPI.

I have a slightly more recent Brother monochrome laser printer than Hazel. These printers don't do much computing - the Postscript gets processed on the host PC by Ghostscript. A full-page monochrome image at native resolution should not be problematic for the host.

ETA - Hazel, for printing, in Gimp convert the grayscale image to indexed with 1bpp (black and white) and set the print resolution to 600 DPI with no page margins. This will produce an exact pixel-by-pixel image for the printer.
Ed

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Brilliant! That did it. Printing the initial 600 dpi scan gave a reasonable but not very good-quality result, rather grey-in-grey. But when I made the indexed version (I had to browse around a bit before I found the right transform option) it came out almost as good as print.

So I have learned that higher resolution is not always a good thing and that you can add contrast later, and those are valuable lessons. Thanks a lot, gentlemen!