Blank output from PDF

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Antony Gelberg <antony at antgel.co.uk> wrote (Wednesday 12 July 2006 15:25):

> Hi all,
> 
> When we try to print
> http://www.companybarclaycard.co.uk/forms/Charge_Cardholder_App.pdf,

This is a PDF version 1.5, made by "Creo Normalizer JTP", BTW...

> there is no output. 

What kind of printer was that?

*How* do you print? Using some PDF viewer, and the print button of 
that program? (This would make that program try and convert the PDF
to PostScript first, which may fail....)

Or did you use the commandline "lp -d printername your.pdf"? This 
would make the CUPS "pdftops" filter convert the file...

> The printer whirrs as it wakes up from standby, but 
> prints nothing.  I have tried to debug this by running pdftops on the
> file, but when I try to display the .ps, it comes up as a blank file in gs.

I tried "gv Charge_Cardholder_App.pdf" and it displayed OK (despite
of some error messages coming up as well, which I dismissed). [BTW,
gv does accept PDFs for display -- it internally converts them first
to a PostScript file using Ghostscript firs.]

I then printed the PDF locally from the commandline to a PostScript 
printer:

  lp -d printername Charge_Cardholder_App.pdf

and from the commandline via a remote CUPS print server:

  lp -h remote-cups-server -d printername Charge_Cardholder_App.pdf

Both printed OK for me.

  * The local CUPS system is self-compiled from current Subversion
    sources (1.2svn-r5719).

  * The remote system was an Ubuntu Dapper with its current 1.2.1 
    package.

> Can anyone shed any light on this? 

Maybe -- if you can provide all the details I can't guess from here...

> We don't have problems printing 
> anything else.

Cheers,
Kurt