CUPS prints PDF's as white page on Brother printer

[Walter Hop]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply :) I only just got around to test it all out,
sorry I'm late.

1. I am not sure if the Brother printer supports real Postscript,
though with CUPS' generic PS driver it seems to accept whatever I
throw at it, it's just that margins/tray control are off. I've now
tried pxlmono.ppd (HP LaserJet Series PCL 6 CUPS) as you suggested,
and have gotten some interesting results:
- For SOME documents, it seems to print correctly
- For other documents, it's OK but I get an empty sheet afterwards
- For other documents, I get a page with the following error:
  ERROR: ioerror
  OFFENDING COMMAND:
  --nostringval--
  STACK:
  -mark-
  -mark-
  -mark-

2. I tried to run pdftops manually after googling its arguments. I
tried the following:

  /usr/local/libexec/cups/filter/pdftops 1 walter '' 1 '' < test.pdf >
test.ps
  /usr/local/bin/lp -oraw -d Brother < test.ps
 => only an empty page comes out

I'm not sure what this signifies, but it does replicate the results I
am having with normal printing from CUPS. The .ps file seems okay to
me (I can open it normally in Ghostscript for Windows).

All in all, the pxlmono.ppd seems a bit worse than the generic PS
driver, producing sometimes weird results. I've tried printing the
offending pdf's via CUPS to a different printer (HP using the generic
PS driver) with no problems, so the .pdf files seem okay to me...

Any further debugging tips would be much appreciated :)

Kind regards,
WH





On Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:19:00 -0700, Paul Conklin
<paul.conklin at cerner.com> wrote:

>ok, 2 questions...
>
>1, are you sure this thing supports Postscript?  looking at the website it has BRScript which it says is some sort of an emmulation.  Just for giggles, i'd try using the pxlmono.ppd filter to see if it prints
>
>2, if you run pdftops manually against it, and lp that file with -oraw to the device, does it print?
>
>> Hi everybody!
>>
>> I hate to post questions just out of the blue, but I'm having bad luck
>> with CUPS. :')
>>
>> I just got a Brother HL-5380DN network printer that I added to CUPS
>> following Brother's own CUPS instructions, which were nothing out of
>> the ordinary
>> (http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/instruction_prn1c.html)
>>
>> Unfortunately, when I print a pdf using CUPS, I am getting only a
>> single white page!
>>
>> Printing a text file seems to go fine, the CUPS self-test page from
>> the administration web interface also works great.
>>
>> I tried the following:
>> - use either lpd or IPP over HTTP
>> - try the ppd from openprinting.org (exactly the same as the
>> vendor-supplied ppd)
>> - try generic Postscript driver (DOES print a pdf, but the margins are
>> off, and I cannot pick a tray)
>> - print some 'known good' PDF files from documentation (in case my PDF
>> might have been corrupt) - same result
>>
>> Does anyone have an ideas for further debugging this problem?
>> I've used other printers on the same system with no trouble.
>>
>> Printer: Brother HL-5380DN
>> System: FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p3, using CUPS 1.5.2 (also tried 1.5.0),
>> cups-pstoraster 8.15.4_6.
>>
>> Some debug logs are at http://u.lfms.nl/cups_debug_logs.txt for those
>> who are interested (my newsreader screwed up the layout...)
>>
>> Any tips welcome :)
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> WH