[cups] Difficulties with Canon Printer

Helge Blischke helgeblischke at web.de
Fri Mar 27 04:13:55 PDT 2015


Just FYI:

xpdf’s pdftops (version 3.04) works fine.
poppler’s pdftops (0.24.5) works fine.
Ghostscript (both 9.10 and 9.14) work fine.

It might be (at least there are some rumors on this) that the printer
in question gets disturbed by a compressed pdf2write output from 
Ghostscript (some none-Adobe PS interpreters tend to fail on
certain combinations of decompression and subfile-decode filters).

The error_log excerpt I asked for might give hints to this issue.

Helge

> Am 27.03.2015 um 11:47 schrieb Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de>:
> 
> 
> 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 is no longer maintained by Adobe, see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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