CUPS & HP4200 wrong printer order

[jboyce at fnf.com]

I'm on RedHat 9, using CUPS with an HP4200 Ljet printer.  I'm using the HP4100 generic postscript driver and the printer is setup via tcpip jetdirect.

My application creates checks as PDF's and sends them to the printer, one by one.  I am positive I am processing and creating the checks in the right order, and I'm even sure I am sending them to the printer in the right order, yet randomly some of them will print out of order.  There doesn't seem to be a real pattern that I can track down.

I thought maybe I was sending them to the printer too fast and the spooler was deciding what orer to print them in, so in my printing script I am sleeping a second or two between each submission.

My original desire was to append them all together in the right order and submit as one job - that would ensure i get them in the right order.  However, the printer will indefinitely sit in a "processing" state (the data light keeps blinking on it like it's receiving data), and then if I go to cups config I can see that the printer has responded with "Received xx bytes of back channel data!" but that is as far as it gets.

I'm guessing I'm using the wrong print driver, or perhaps CUPS is goofed up?  I added the printer using "redhat-config-printer", and then the printer shows up in CUPS.  I guess in this version of CUPS (or the OS, not sure) doesn't use /etc/printcap (it only has the printer name in it).  I'm on CUPS 1.1.17.  The /var/log/cups/error_log doesn't show anything unusual.

I'm not sure at this point if I should re-install/upgrade CUPS or go about using a different print driver.  I had trouble installing HPIJS - and then read a lot of people recommended using the generic postscript driver closest to my printer model.

Thanks,

Jim