Hello Carl, On Sun, 2014-11-02 at 10:49 +1100, Carl Turney wrote:
Hi All,
Mike, your response is the only one I've received so far on this topic.
Meatspace has its demands too.
Yeah, I too vaguely remember creating an MSDOS batch file that shot the ASCII form-feed character out to the printer port, for times when it was needed... about 25 years ago.
Never heard of HPLIP, nor how to determine if my Mint Qiana has it loaded up.
Seem to think that relates to CUPS somehow. I have had issues now and then with a HP LJ4P doing longer runs, especially of labels, hand fed. Sometimes exactly what you commented, but not necessarily only at the start of a page, sometimes perhaps 10% in. My "fix" was to issue one page print jobs. The other hiccup is that Evolution will insist on printing to US Letter rather than A4, except on the HP LJ4+ running postscript. Never found a fix, so when I really want to print an email, cut and paste into an editor and print from there. Since this A20m Thinkpad lacks memory and HDD to upgrade, it is running out of date software, but it does work, mostly.
Rather than a local Melbourne fix, I was trying to find a specialist forum relative to the cause of my problem. i.e. Some hardware driver author, or CUPS programmer, could see my problem, write a fix, and offer it to the Linux (or Debian or Ubuntu or Mint) community as a global update. But maybe you're one of those guys, Mike?
I suspect that characters get dropped, or something added, to switch modes. Not quite certain of how to check. If I could appropriately tee the character stream to the printer port, it would be possible to inspect one way or another. CUPS does use "filters" of various sorts, When I can get my head around, I would like to comprehend quite how it all works, but meatspace currently takes priority.
Cheers,
Carl Bayswater, Vic
Regards, Mark Trickett