[cups] Text being garbled - Ricoh Pro 1156/1157 - Cups 1.5 and 1.7.2

[Helge Blischke]

> Am 21.04.2016 um 20:09 schrieb Chris Coleman <c at chriscoleman.com>:
> 
> Helge and Johannes thank you so much for providing so much helpful
> information.
> As I start digging in to your responses I have a couple quick
> questions/responses.
> 
> 1. Files are being generated originally outside of our org. with iText by
> lowagie.com (r0.95)       <-- I'm afraid to say that is a 12 year old
> version of iText ;-(
>   and then we are doing some additional modifications (adding a 2d barcode
> using PDFLib)
> Producer:       PDFlib+PDI 9.0.3 (PHP5/Linux-x86_64)
> CreationDate:   Thu Mar 31 13:05:12 2016
> Tagged:         no
> Pages:          18
> Encrypted:      no
> Page size:      612 x 792 pts (letter)
> File size:      446215 bytes
> Optimized:      no
> PDF version:    1.4
> 
> 2. Why does cups report the following? Johannes, you explained the
> workflow, but this still seems quite odd to me...
> Filetype: PDF
> D [20/Apr/2016:14:06:40 -0700] [Job 1186] Neither PDF renderer command line
> nor Ghostscript-based renderer command line found
> D [20/Apr/2016:14:06:40 -0700] [Job 1186] Driver does not understand PDF
> input, converting to PostScript
> 
> 3. Unfortunately, we cannot use the PS PPD because not all of our printers
> have the PS option on board.
> 
> 4. I noticed that Poppler is being used for pdftops and tried to
> build/install the latest version but was unable to get the make to work on
> the ubuntu 12.04 boxes. Figured I'd give it a shot on the ubuntu 14 box,
> but haven't gotten there yet.
> 
> Again, thank you so much, I will continue working my way through your
> responses.
> Chris
> _______________________________________________

From you log file it is apparent that you have the cups-filters package from open printing installed.
One of the filters provided there is
gstopxl
which is a shell script and accompanied by two PPDs (for color and b/w devices, respectively).
Installation of this package should put the filter script into /usr/lib/cups/filter and the two PPDs into
/usr/share/cupsfilters .
I’d suggest to try these for your printers and see what happens.

Helge