Bug 783850

Summary:	Printing has stopped working for a Kyocera cs-3050 PostScript printer
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 12.2	Reporter:	James Moe <jimoe>
Component:	Printing	Assignee:	Johannes Meixner <jsmeix>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	Johannes Meixner <jsmeix>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	openSUSE 12.2
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Community User	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description James Moe 2012-10-06 20:36:57 UTC

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1

Kyocera cs-3050 printer

We have had this printer for at least 4 years. No problems. It is a really excellent printer.

I saw the non-printing issue first with LibreOffice. A print job is sent to the printer (via a remote CUPS server), and nothing is printed despite all the celebration about successfully submitting the job. Now the non-printing feature has spread to other programs, Firefox and Thunderbird so far.

I discovered that, for some unknown reason, that LibreOfiice has decided that this particular printer (Kyocera CS-3050) should use a default language of PDF instead of Postscript. WTF! That so does not work.

I suspect the same thing is happening with the other apps as well.I can open the "Properties" for the printer in LibreOffice and change the output language; I cannot do the same for the other apps, as there is no Properties option.

I can print to other printers (HP laserjets) with no problem, but those printers are "personal" ones, not meant for general use.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select "Print" from the File menu
2. Select Print pushbutton

Actual Results:
The print job goes to the printer via a CUPS server. The printer logs the job as having been completed (the printer log shows that no page was printed and the status was OK).

No output occurs.

Expected Results:
Printed page(s).

The non-printing started happening about a week ago. There have been a series of updates. I do not know if any of them are related to this issue.

I originally asked about this in the openSuse application forum <http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/479239-printing-has-stopped-working-printer.html>. While I fixed the problem specifically for LibreOffice, there was no general solution offered.

Comment 1 Johannes Meixner 2012-10-09 08:00:27 UTC

I guess it is a duplicate of bnc#774627.
To verify, switch in your PostScript that it prints out PostScript errors
and if you get a sheet printed with a "setoverprintmode" error message,
it is actually a duplicate of bnc#774627.


Regarding "Printing on PostScript printers no longer works..."
see bnc#770880 bnc#781660 and bnc#774627


Regarding LibreOffice, see also bnc#781193 "LibreOffice: Cannot
print landscape if it generates PDF (works for PostScript)".


Regarding "default language of PDF instead of Postscript":

The underlying reason is the switch from PostScript to PDF
as the standard print job format in various applications,
compare bnc#732442 ("Applications using Qt produce PDF for
printing which can fail on PostScript printers").

This change is advocated by the
OpenPrinting workgroup of the Linux Foundation
and the CUPS author, see "PDF as standard print job format..." at
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting

See also
"PDF: The future common printing format" at
http://en.opensuse.org/Concepts_printing

For my personal opinion see
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=732442#c5

I think the real problem is when applications cannot be easily
switched back from PDF to PostScript as standard print job format.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 774627 ***

Comment 2 James Moe 2012-10-10 16:22:23 UTC

> To verify, switch in your PostScript that it 
> prints out PostScript errors...
>
There is no obvious place where that setting may be enabled. Can you suggest where it may be?

Comment 3 Johannes Meixner 2012-10-11 07:42:08 UTC

There is a typo in comment #1, it should read
"switch in your PostScript printer that it prints out PostScript errors"

It is a PostScript printer internal setting whether or not
it prints error messages when its built-in PostScript interpreter
fails.

If it is not described in your printer's manual how
to let it print out PostScript errors, you should ask
the vendor or the manufacturer of your printer if and how
their PostScript printers can be switched to do it.

Usually in a PostScript printer you can switch on that it prints out
PostScript errors if it fails to process PostScript so that you get
a PostScript error printed in such cases so that you know that it
was your printer which failed.

Unfortunately those PostScript error printouts are usually disabled
so that the user is not informed what went wrong.

Of course it saves a lot of paper (and money) when the one sheet
with the PostScript error is not printed by default and apparently
it costs nothing when then users need a lot of time to find out why
a particular document does not print... :-(

I do not say that the typcial PostScript error printout text
is meaningful for normal users but at least they would know
their printer somehow does not like their particular document.

Comment 4 James Moe 2012-10-12 00:18:27 UTC

Okay, I found the setting deep in the printer's page language options. And, yes, the error is "Offending command: setoverprintmode".

So, this may be closed as a duplicate.