[cups.general] very strange dot-matrix printer problem: randomly wrong print result (ghostscript-esc p2)

Ambrose Li ambrose.li at gmail.com
Tue Sep 12 22:40:05 PDT 2006


Hi

this sounds like your Novell's printing system has broken up your
print jobs to many small print jobs. The result of this, when printing
on any non-Postscript printer (Epson, PCL-based, etc.), is exactly
what you describe.

This is sometimes caused by the server having a short timeout and
thinking that a print job is over, when the application is just slow.
This can also be caused by Windows printing directly to the printer
(if you use Windows).

What happens is that the driver has no "print wrong page mode". But
with non-Postscript printers (esp. dot matrix and inkjets), if you
corrupt the data when the printer is in graphics mode (such as when
the print server incorrectly breaks up the print job), the printer
will treat part of the graphics data as random printer commands,
resulting in weird behaviours like random characters, printing blank
pages, random beeps, etc.

If you have a timeout setting on your Novell server that controls
capturing of print jobs, you should try increasing the timeout. If you
are printing from Windows, try configuring the print queue to "print
only when last page is spooled".


-- 
cheers,
-ambrose





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