Practicalites of non-DSC-conformant PostScript

[Michael Sweet]

John A. Murdie wrote:
> We've recently purchased two of the new small HP colour printer, the
> HP LaserJet 2605dn) - because it's the smallest HP colour printer we
> could find with automatic duplexing. We're printing to one of the
> printers from Windows XP (driver version PSCRIPT5.DLL version 5.02,
> apparently the lates) into CUPS and find that for certain documents
> the printout is mangled and the PostScript error message "ERROR:
> undefined OFFENDING COMMAND: CMAP-WinCharSetFFFF-H2" is printed after
> the mangled pages. Printing to file and printing the resultant
> PostScript with "lpr -o raw" results in a correctly-printed document.
> My guess is that pstops(1) is destroying non-DSC-conformant
> PostScript. (I can't post the example documents with a bug report, as
> they are confidential. Perhaps I could find a non-confidential
> document that is broken in this way.)

It might be CID fonts being embedded without the proper encoding.

Does this happen with all applications or just specific apps/documents?

Are you using drivers exported by Samba via cupsaddsmb or the CUPS
web interface, or are you using the vendor drivers (which are also
usually based on PSCRIPT5.DLL)?

> What can one do about this in general? We could set "raw" as default
> for that printer queue so that Windows could print there, but that
> would exclude its use by Linux with well-behaved PostScript. Perhaps
> we could have two queues for each of our printers, one set "raw" for
> use by Windows, the other a regular queue for our Linux systems,
> though this is a messy idea - Occam's Law and all that.

Some folks setup Samba to print using the "raw" or
"document-format=application/vnd.cups-raw" options; this bypasses
the usual filtering without resorting to a separate queue.  The down
side is that you lose page accounting...

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com