[cups] Difficulties with printing music score .pdfs

[Johannes Meixner]

Hello,

On Sep 1 10:23 Alan McConnell wrote (excerpt):
> ... problems with printing .pdfs bearing music notation.
...
> Yet when I run  'lp beeth-1symph-p1.pdf', I get some cramped
> non-discernable scrawling at the top inch of my 8x11 sheet and
> the rest is covered with deep dense Black!
...
> I run 'old-stable' Debian Wheezy.  I would need some convincing
> to persuade me that this problem would go away if I moved to a
> newer Debian release.

Printouts where the whole sheet is basically black
(when you look carefully you may see some non-black dots)
have been reported some time ago at Ghostscript upstream
and are solved since some time.

Very most PDF issues that are reported to Ghostscript upstream
are actually caused by "strange" PDFs.

This is the reason that most PDF prining issues happen
only for particular kind of PDFs - usually PDFs from
one particular kind of application (in your case the
application that made the PDFs with music notation).

If Ghostscript is run during conversion of the PDF into
printer specific data (check CUPS error_log what
processes are run for such a print job), then it
might be an issue in your 'old-stable' Ghostscript.

Have a look at
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:How_to_Report_a_Printing_Issue
regarding some basic tests that could help to diagnose
the root cause of a printing issue.


Kind Regards
Johannes Meixner
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