intermittent pdftops failed

[liz hostetter]

The school district i work for has been getting iPads, and to enable them to print a CUPS server has been set up. Unfortunately, i have no idea how to get into the server itself, only how to get to the web interface and administer the printers themselves. We are only allowing HP printers to have queues on the CUPS server.

Extremely intermittently, i will create a queue - the same way each time, and always using the Postscript (recommended) driver if possible - and upon testing will get a "/usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops failed" message. Everything i've researched about this error seems to point to a problem in parsing pdf data - but i don't test print a pdf; i use the iPads Notes app and just send a simple job with queue name and a sentence.

Has anyone else encountered this when NOT printing pdf?

As an additional note, i went through and tried every HP2055 (that's the printer i was adding at the time; that's the majority of the printers meant for iPads here) driver - each gave me some sort of 'failed' message, though not always pdftops. That happened even with an entirely new queue, and using IP instead of DDNS hostname.

Thanks for any advice!