Extremely slow printing problem

Dave Birns dave at alienaa.com
Tue Jul 15 14:49:44 PDT 2008


Hopefully somewhere here can help me:

I've got a Star Micronics TSP650 connected to OS X 10.5.4 computer. The printer is set to Star Line mode, connected via USB. Using CUPS drivers from the star micronics website. Used to have a TSP600, worked fine, but the 650 is acting all wonky.

Basically, in theory it works fine, plug it in, is properly detected, driver loaded, can print to it. But after the first print (and also dependent on size of what's being printed) it starts crawling to the point of basically a line every few minutes. I'm just sending text, and sending it with lpr -l, so as far as I understand it literally should just be sending raw text to the printer. It does work, just very sporadically, and the problem seems to be with the sending of the data to the actual printer. I set loglevel to debug2, but no errors (at least obvious ones to me) or anything are appearing in any of the cups logs. Since basically they're the same printer, tried using the tsp600 drivers, they "work" but the same massive slowing down happens. It's not consistent either, sending 10 characters of text could cause the slowdown, but then it'll print pages before hanging again.

This behavior appears both in raw mode and when sending it with the proper filters and stuff, e.g. from textedit.

Is there some better way to see the progress of what's being sent to the printer, like communication logs or something, or some way to tell if it's just a defective printer?

Thanks in advance!




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