CentOS - Dec 2005 - Printing Postscript - Very Weird Problem.

Hey folks,

okay, here's the situation - I have a Centos 4.2 system with cups printing 
installed printing via postcript (with appropriate PPD file) to a HP 
LaserJet 1320N printer (via jetdirect socket 9100).

Everything seems to work right - except for an unusual 'font'???
problem.
Many letters seem to be just slightly garbled.  At first I thought this 
was a mechanical problem at the printer (for weeks), but just this morning 
I took a closer look and realized everything was too regular for it to be 
a mechanical failure (ink smearing or something).

Anyway the problem is that the bottom non-empty scanline of _very_ many 
letters/digits/symbols gets transposed over ontop of the topmost non-empty 
scanline of the same character.

This results in the following conversion (rough ascii art - note there's a 
lot more scanlines involved due to far higher resolution, which means this 
is far more invisible).

|      AA      |    | AA        AA |
|     AAAA     |    |     AAAA     |
|    AA  AA    | => |    AA  AA    |
|   AAAAAAAA   |    |   AAAAAAAA   |
|  AA      AA  |    |  AA      AA  |
| AA        AA |    | AA        AA |

Any idea how to fix this?  What could be the problem?  How to figure out 
what could be causing it?  It's a very good printer which has no other 
faults, and it's printing the above characters very crisply... (not that 
it matter seeing as they are bad...).

Cheers,
MaZe.

On 14/12/05, Maciej ?enczykowski <maze at cela.pl>
wrote:
>
> Any idea how to fix this?  What could be the problem?  How to figure out
> what could be causing it?  It's a very good printer which has no other
> faults, and it's printing the above characters very crisply... (not
that
> it matter seeing as they are bad...).
Do you see the same character distortion if you get the printer to
self-test? You can normally get HP printers to perform separate ASCII
and PCL/PS test prints bypassing the client and proving the problem
isn't the printer itself.

http://www.lavc.edu/IT/Manuals/Printer_HP_Laserjet_1160-1320_User_Guide.pdf

Will.

"MZ" == Maciej ?enczykowski <maze at cela.pl>

    MZ> Hey folks, okay, here's the situation - I have a Centos
    MZ> 4.2 system with cups printing installed printing via
    MZ> postcript (with appropriate PPD file) to a HP LaserJet
    MZ> 1320N printer (via jetdirect socket 9100).

I have the same setup....

    MZ> Everything seems to work right - except for an unusual
    MZ> 'font'??? problem.  Many letters seem to be just slightly
    MZ> garbled.  

I have also seen this problem, generally when printing a PDF file
(generated with TeX) from gv.  If I open the file in Acrobat, it
prints fine.

I just tried generating some PostScript by piping the output of a
command that produces ASCII through ``a2ps -1'', and I see no
issues with the printout.

If I take a simple LaTeX document and TeX it, producing a DVI file;
then run dvips to produce a PostScript file and print that file
From gv, I see no issues.  On the other hand, if I run that same
PostScript file through ps2pdf, then open the PDF file in gv and
print it, I see the broken/malformed character issue.

Running pdflatex on the source file to get a PDF file gives the
same results: looks fine on screen, prints with broken/malformed
characters from gv; prints fine from Acrobat.


I had the very same problem with a LaserJet 1200 connected via a
parallel cable under CentOS 3 a while back, and never really
figured out what the deal was beyond this point.  The obvious
candidate is GhostScript, or gv's use of GhostScript to generate
PostScript from the PDF file.

Sorry I can't be more specific about what the cause is or a better
solution, but at least you know you're not alone in having the
problem!

   Claire

P.S. On Will's question -- self tests work fine.  It's definitely
     not the printer, unless it's some weird interaction between
     its emulated-PostScript interpreter and GhostScript.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  Claire Connelly                              cmc at math.hmc.edu 
  Systems Administrator                          (909) 621-8754   
  Department of Mathematics                 Harvey Mudd College
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
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