[plug] using CUPS & netatalk to do mac printer spooling

[Craig Ringer]

>>So... I have two printers that spew gibberish when sent these files,
> 
> I don't recall any problems printing from Mac OS 9 through CUPS on
> Solaris, but that setup doesn't exist any more. I was going to try
> something on Linux yesterday, but running CUPS on the test machine
> caused the whole computer to freeze hard -- will have to learn how
> to use a Linux kernel debugger some day.

I'm very surprised to hear that it froze the machine. I can only imagine 
that it ran into a problem while probing the serial or parallel ports 
for devices, since I can't think of anything else cupsd does that could 
interact in interesting ways with the kernel.

I find remote syslogging very useful for figuring out what caused a 
crash - seeing

hostname.localnet cupsd: probing serial port /dev/ttyS0

as the last message on the remote host can be quite informative.

>>both Acrobat Distiller and GhostScript think the files are fine.
> 
> Can you just put one of these files (minus copyrighted material)
> somewhere where we can actually look at it?

Sure. There's not too much need to worry about the contents - one is a 
photo taken in-house, another is an advertiser's job. They're unlikely 
to mind ;-) and the job is our property anyway, since we set the ad.

An interesting test I just did now has my brain really hurting. I took 
one of the PostScript files that I captured after it'd been spooled by 
CUPS (specifically the big Quark EPS job, below), and copied it to one 
of the macs. I then dropped it onto the desktop printer that is linked 
directly to the Xerox. The Mac happily sent the PostScript file to the 
printer, where it was printed without complaint. *ARRGGH*. The _same_ 
file, when I send it over JetDirect or using the HTTP interface on the 
printer, comes out as reams of gibberish.

Anyway, the files. They're all on 
http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/~craig/psjobs/
and are:

simpletext_embed.ps.gz [336k]
	A job sent from SimpleText on the mac, with font embedding
	forced to on in the print setup. Prints fine.

simple_quark.ps	[47k]
	A simple job printed from Quark - just a text box with the
	word "TEST" in it. Font embedding was off. This prints fine.

picviewer.ps.bz2 [1510k]
	Bzip2'd PostScript file; a print job from Apple PictureViewer,
	the same photo that was used to test in Photoshop. Prints fine.

quark_ad_rawqueue.ps.bz2 [1252k]
	A Quark doc containing a single large EPS image. Will not print,
	but distills fine. Queue used the raw driver in CUPS.

quark_ad_xeroxqueue.ps.bz2 [1253k]
	The same, but printed via a print queue that uses the Xerox PPD
	as a driver. Also fails to print, but will distill fine.

I can't really post the photoshop file, as it came out at well above 
13mb. I can't currently make a lower-res version as all the machines 
with photoshop are in use. The Quark jobs produce the same problem anyway.

Craig Ringer


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