[wplug-bsd] FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE Printer Issues

[Benjamin Slavin]

I have reinstalled FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, and installed apsfilter, hpijs, 
ghostscript, (and dependencies) from their respective ports.

I have disconnected all other USB devices in the hope that maybe there 
was too much "chatter" on the USB channel, but alas, this was not the 
case... it still prints small portions of the page, then loads a new 
page, then continues. Additionally, when printing a test page from 
apsfilter's setup program, the breaks are at identical locations every time.

As I had stated previously, this printer worked with other operating 
systems on the same computer, so I'm out of ideas. Any suggestions you 
have would be greatly appreciated.

  --Ben

Bill Moran wrote:

> [...]
>
>> LPRng was my next hope, so I compiled the port, and tried to install 
>> it. CUPS had left, for example, lpc in a directory which was searched 
>> before the location for LPRng, so I was forced to manually uninstall 
>> all of CUPS. I did this, and configured LPRng with lprngtool, and 
>> some help from the linuxprinting page mentioned above. I had issues 
>> printing until I set /dev/ulpt0 to [chmod 777] (which I am not 
>> entirely comfortable doing). After doing this, the printer functioned 
>> exactly as with LPD. ASCII prints correctly, but PostScript does not.
>
>
> It doesn't sound like LPR/LPRng is the point of issue (since they both
> act the same)  And as an FYI, it's not the place to look for those type
> of printing problems anyway.  LPR/LPD (and the equivalents in LPRng) do
> not process the data on its way out, they only manage the queue and
> the communication.  I suppose it's possible that it's a communication
> problem, but unlikely.
>
> I would first look into problems with the postscript processing.  I
> believe postscript has several versions, and you may be sending the
> printer a postscript file that it's not compatible with.  First off,
> is that printer postscript capable at all?  You might have good success
> using software such as apsfilter or magicfilter to automagically
> convert your print jobs to the required data format.
>