About a year ago I bought a Lexmark MS415dn laser printer, a well-known and reasonably popular model; I checked linux compatibility before buying and it was rated highly. Recently it now prints PDF files at best half the time. Otherwise it seems to dump two or three lines of random gibberish (possibly postscript code) to pages and pages and pages, with no way to stop it short of unplugging it. Sometimes it will print a file just fine, and then fail to print the very same file immediately afterwards. Sometimes it just won't print a file no matter what or when. Pulling the plug, clearing the paper jams, restarting the printer, restarting CUPS, telling CUPS it's ready to work again -- well, it's all a bit much, and even then it screws up the next job through about half the time. I'm using Arch Linux with the current (5.6.4) kernel and CUPS 2.3.1. Suggestions? Suggestions for a more reliable printer? -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
On 2020-04-16 5:41 p.m., Peter King via talk wrote:
Lexmark MS415dn
What driver are you using? If a printer can use IPP - and yours can, if networked - then it's zero work to use that driver. Does Arch come with the CUPS IPP drivers? Printer drivers are over, for me at least. There's IPP printers, and there are printers I don't own. Stewart
On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 07:31:09PM -0400, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
On 2020-04-16 5:41 p.m., Peter King via talk wrote:
Lexmark MS415dn
What driver are you using?
The Lexmark ms415dn driver available through foomatic -- in other words, a printer-specific driver. OpenPrinting suggests using Postscript-Lexmark but that's generic. At the moment the printer is not networked; I've had too many problems in the past with network printers. I'll try it again with this one before I give up. -- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
| From: Peter King via talk <talk@gtalug.org> I started writing this yesterday, before Stewart's concise and insightful message. He's right about networking. Of course it brings its own problems (security on the printer, firewall piercing on your computer, ...). I'm guessing that this is on a home LAN, behind NAT, so security of the printer isn't a big concern. I don't know enough about IPP, but I suspect that the actual data could be in PCL or PostScript or something else and that the printer has to intuit which encoding is used. As described below, I suspect that your printer is guessing wrong about this. Perhaps IPP would not solve your problem. My trouble with printers is that I solve these problems once every few years and forget what I learned in between. | About a year ago I bought a Lexmark MS415dn laser printer, a well-known and | reasonably popular model; I checked linux compatibility before buying and | it was rated highly. I haven't used this one, so this is just guesswork. Here are the specs of your printer: <https://www.lexmark.com/en_us/printer/9200/Lexmark-MS415dn> Your printer apparently has "hardware" PostScript, as well as PCL 5e and 6. I'm guessing that using a driver that generates PostScript is better than using PCL. That may not be the case if the computer is better at rendering than the printer's processor. Speaking of processors, the specs say: dual core, 0.8 MHz. That's astonishingly slow and surely wrong. My first laser printer (from 1989) had an 6 MHz 68000 processor. | Recently it now prints PDF files at best half the time. Otherwise it seems | to dump two or three lines of random gibberish (possibly postscript code) | to pages and pages and pages, with no way to stop it short of unplugging | it. I'd *guess* that's not PostScript. PostScript is somewhat readable text. Perhaps your driver is sending PCL. PCL is a fairly low-level Printer Control Language first used in the 1980's by HP and copied by most other printer makers. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_Command_Language> Printers often have to guess whether a stream is in PCL or PostScript. Sometimes they get it wrong. I've not figured out why or how to fix it. Or maybe the problem is in the program you use. How does lpr(1) know which kind of file that it is printing? In theory, I think that PostScript files come with a prefix string that can be recognized. Like: %!PS-Adobe-3.0 (Grabbed from a file I just created for this.) | Sometimes it will print a file just fine, and then fail to print the | very same file immediately afterwards. Sometimes it just won't print a | file no matter what or when. Pulling the plug, clearing the paper jams, | restarting the printer, restarting CUPS, telling CUPS it's ready to work | again -- well, it's all a bit much, and even then it screws up the next job | through about half the time. | | I'm using Arch Linux with the current (5.6.4) kernel and CUPS 2.3.1. What exactly is your chain of processing? - What is creating the file, if any? - what format is the file? - what is taking the file and flinging it at CUPS? - do different files have this problem? eg lpr text-file lpr postscript-file lpr pdf-file printing from evince printing from FireFox What changed in your system just before you observed the problem? Perhaps an update? Or a change of procedures?
On 2020-04-17 10:23 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I don't know enough about IPP, but I suspect that the actual data could be in PCL or PostScript or something else …
It's a bit more clever than that. All IPP/AirPrint printers *must* support a basic bitmap format that is open and well-defined. IPP printers advertise what formats they support: querying my Brother printer (using ipptool) says it handles image/urf and image/pwg-raster. Some can also accept PCL and PDF. The internal routing of CUPS print jobs is done as PDF. CUPS is rather lovely unless you want to see the internals. IPP allows printer manufacturers to change hardware completely on the same model and still keep working*. Since the most important question for any printer sold these days is "Can I print from my iPhone?", IPP/AirPrint support is not going away. Google Cloud Print, btw, *is* going away this year. (Apple owns CUPS, and AirPrint is their trade name for IPP.) The "dual core, 0.8 MHz" is more likely to be "dual core, 0.8 GHz". Dual core Qoriq boards (typically Power, but sometimes ARM) are what powers so much hardware we take for granted. cheers, Stewart *: this makes sites like LinuxPrinting completely useless, alas, but makes for cheaper printers.
On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 11:50:57AM -0400, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
It's a bit more clever than that. All IPP/AirPrint printers *must* support a basic bitmap format that is open and well-defined. IPP printers advertise what formats they support: querying my Brother printer (using ipptool) says it handles image/urf and image/pwg-raster. Some can also accept PCL and PDF.
The internal routing of CUPS print jobs is done as PDF. CUPS is rather lovely unless you want to see the internals. IPP allows printer manufacturers to change hardware completely on the same model and still keep working*. Since the most important question for any printer sold these days is "Can I print from my iPhone?", IPP/AirPrint support is not going away. Google Cloud Print, btw, *is* going away this year.
When did they change from postscript to pdf? Hmm a search seems to indicate quite a few years ago. I had never known it changed. I guess the change just worked. I am also surprised anyone prints from an iphone. Really? What are they printing?
(Apple owns CUPS, and AirPrint is their trade name for IPP.)
The "dual core, 0.8 MHz" is more likely to be "dual core, 0.8 GHz". Dual core Qoriq boards (typically Power, but sometimes ARM) are what powers so much hardware we take for granted.
cheers, Stewart
*: this makes sites like LinuxPrinting completely useless, alas, but makes for cheaper printers.
Well if they also want to work with windows drivers and a usb connection, they probably still have to maintain some kind of compatibility, although what format they use in their drivers to the printer could be really anything I suppose. -- Len Sorensen
On 2020-04-17 1:05 p.m., Lennart Sorensen wrote:
I am also surprised anyone prints from an iphone. Really? What are they printing?
I think we're very much in the minority *not* printing from tablets and phones, Lennart. My teenage niece and nephew only grudgingly use Chromebooks for "boring school stuff"; everything else is tablets and phones. Most of the accessibility clients my employer works with need access tools for tablets and game consoles much more frequently than computers.
Well if they also want to work with windows drivers and a usb connection,
Only the really cheap (< $50) printers are USB only. Tethering a printer via USB means you actually have to have a device with a USB port. By plugging it in via USB, you also tend to lose the built-in printer server that's built into most wireless printers. No additional cables, and everyone on the network can see it and print automatically. What a brave and strange future we find ourselves living in ... cheers, and stay safe Stewart
participants (4)
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D. Hugh Redelmeier -
lsorense＠csclub.uwaterloo.ca -
Peter King -
Stewart C. Russell