[cups.development] CUPS Print Self Test Page does not work for non-Postscript printers

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Tue Jan 11 11:57:33 PST 2011


On Jan 11, 2011, at 11:51 AM, George Liu wrote:
> I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 with CUPS 1.4.4.
> 
> I setup a printer queue for a PCL-XL printer, using socket 9100 protocol.
>> From CUPS web interface, I picked "Maintenance-> Print Self Test Page".
> 
> The test page printed, however, it printed the following information:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> %!
>  userdict dup(\004) cvn{}put (\004\004)cvn{}put
>                            % You are using the wrong driver
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> It seems that the command did not go through filter chain and landed in printer directly. What will confuse the user is the sentence "You are using the wrong driver".
> 
> On a Postscript printer, it worked fine, and printed out printer model name along with PSVersion.
> 
> Can we change the print self-test content to be something neutral?

Well, the content can't be made that neutral because printers don't support a standard set of file formats (yet).

However, CUPS 1.4 and later *do* use a new (simple) CUPS banner format for the test page instead, using a filter to generate the necessary content for the printer.  It sounds like either Ubuntu's CUPS is broken or the correct driver was not chosen for the printer.

________________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair





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