Re: [MLUG] problem with duplex printing

[Mikhail Kovalenko <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Mike Miller wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Mikhail Kovalenko wrote:
>>Could it be a problem with Ghostscript? If he uses LPD, have him run this:
>>
>>tailf /var/spool/lpd/lp/status.lp
>>
>>as he tries to print (substitute lp with the actual name of the printer). This
>>might give you a clue to where the problem is.
> 
> My friend replies:
> 
> I got nothing when I ran the command. I suspect it may have to do with the
> version of ghostscript as I am able to deal with several other pdf files,
> just not that one. Hence, it may have something therein which the slightly
> older version of ghostscript can't deal with.
> 
> Unfortunately, the newer versions of ghostscript are all packaged for
> redhat 8 (the box I have uses redhat 7.3 and I don't know how difficult it
> would be to upgrade and keep everything intact).
> 
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 

Upgrading will not necessarily fix the problem. Let me tell you a little story:

I have a coworker who works on a laptop PC and a Mac (G3). She has an HP 
printer without a Postscript module and without any way to connect to that Mac 
except for a network cable. So for a long time I had been spooling her 
Pagemaker print jobs through a RedHat 6.2 server with netatalk. Worked like a 
charm. Then I decided to upgrade to the latest and greatest - RH 8 - because 
the spooler had other services running that could use the upgrade. Surely 
enough, I get a call from her saying that her print jobs started disappearing 
into the ether. And not all of them but only *some* jobs, especially certain 
ones from Pagemaker. So we started looking into it; she even tried different 
Pagemaker versions, but I couldn't find any consistent clues to put my finger 
on. The failed jobs, however, produced a log in the print spool directory like 
this:

[...everything looks fine here...]
IF filter 'mf_wrapper' filter msg - 'closing *main::KID3' at 
2003-02-06-16:16:13.143
IF filter 'mf_wrapper' filter msg - 'Error closing pipe to gs -q -dBATCH 
-dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=lj5gray -r600x600 -sOutputFile=- - | perl -p -e 
"s/\xc0.\xf8\x26/\xc0\x01\xf8\x26/g" at /usr/sbin/lpdomatic line 544, <STDIN> 
line 130446.' at 2003-02-06-16:16:13.144
IF filter 'mf_wrapper' filter exit status 'JFAIL' at 2003-02-06-16:16:13.186
printing finished at 2003-02-06-16:16:13.187
[...]
finished EMAIL:PROTECTED status 'JSUCC' at 2003-02-06-16:16:13.192
subserver pid 8237 exit status 'JSUCC' at 2003-02-06-16:16:13.197
job EMAIL:PROTECTED printed at 2003-02-06-16:16:13.199
[...]

I confess that I didn't have much time or desire to figure out the exact 
reason for the failure. I did find a mention of some bugs filed for 
Ghostscript against the version of Pagemaker she was using (6.something, 
IIRC). So I grabbed a spare Pentium PC lying around, loaded it up with RH 6.2, 
set up a print spool the way it used to be and gave it to her. Spooling is all 
that PC does, and she has been happy ever since. That's all that counts, right?

...Not that this story has any relevance to your friend's problem, I just 
thought it might be interesting anyway :)

-- 
MK

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