[cups] Difficulties with Canon Printer

Johannes Meixner jsmeix at suse.de
Fri Mar 27 03:47:46 PDT 2015


Hello,

On Mar 26 21:42 Helge Blischke wrote (excerpt):
> I suspect that your issue is due to some deficiency in one of the
> filters used on your system, probably pdftopdf or pdftops.
...
> ... I have the sources of the cups-filter pacage ...
...
>> Am 26.03.2015 um 20:46 schrieb Alan McConnell <alan at his.com>:
>> ... Debian Wheezy ... CUPS 1.5.3

With CUPS 1.5.3 usually not the filters from cups-filters
are used but CUPS' own traditional filters and usually
the traditional PostScript workflow is used basically like
   PDF --pdftops--> PostScript --driver--> printer

But I don't know what is actually used in Debian Wheezy.


>> Bottom line: some .pdfs print just fine, but this one .pdf
>> prints ridiculously, uselessly, and expensively.

It is a long known general problem that some PDFs fail.

It may depend on what particular PDF processing tool
is used whether or not it fails (but some PDFs are
so awkward that all PDF processing tools fail).

For example under Linux usual PDF processing tools
are Xpdf and its successor Poppler on the one hand
and Ghostscript on the other hand.

Additionally there was the Adobe Reader but that one
is no longer maintained by Adobe, see
https://en.opensuse.org/Adobe_Reader

The traditional CUPS filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops is
usually only a wrapper that calls the system's /usr/bin/pdftops
and that is usally provided by Xpdf or Poppler (at least this
is how it works on openSUSE - I don't know about Debian Wheezy).

When the CUPS filter pdftops fails to process a particular PDF,
it may help to use another PDF processing tool, e.g. Ghostscript
to convert the PDF into PostScript by using /usr/bin/pdf2ps.

Note the difference 'pdftops' indicates Xpdf or Poppler
while 'pdf2ps' indicates Ghostscript.

E.g. you may call
# pdf2ps input.pdf output.ps
to convert a PDF into PostScript and the print the output.ps file.

Or when the CUPS filter pdftops is based on Ghostscript
you may use Xpdf/Poppler to convert the PDF into PostScript like
# pdftops input.pdf output.ps
and then print the output.ps PostScript file.

>From my point of view the main causes why some PDFs fail are
that there is no such thing as one single PDF format and
that a full-fatured PDF could be really complicated,
see in general
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format
and for one particular example see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_%28graphic%29#Transparency_in_PDF


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
-- 
SUSE LINUX GmbH - GF: Felix Imendoerffer, Jane Smithard, Jennifer Guild,
Dilip Upmanyu, Graham Norton - HRB 21284 (AG Nuernberg)




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