222624 - [ps] Mozillas PostScript is not printed by CUPS

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Peter Mueller]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031009
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031009

We have a printserver based on CUPS on SuSE Linux 8.1! I have installed SuSE
Linux 9.0 with Mozilla 1.5 on a Client PC. Printing a webpage with Mozilla leads
to a postscriptfile which is not printed by CUPS. If I print the same webpage
with konqueror or opera everything works fine and is printed. So it happens only
with Mozilla (tested versions: 1.4.1 and 1.5), Firebird and Thunderbird. On
another client with SuSE Linux 8.2 and Mozilla 1.4.0 everything works fine.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install a CUPS server on one PC
2. Print with Mozilla (i.E. 1.5) to that server a webpage or an email
3.

Actual Results:  
see Details

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Is the postscript sent directly to the printer?  Or is it filtered through
ghostscript first?  If the former, does the printer support level 3 postscript?
 What about level 2?

Comment 2

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

I see the same problem. In my case the postscript code isn't filtered by CUPS
because it is Postscript. If I let CUPS filter it through ghostscript all
is working again. The printer I've tested doesn't support PS L3 AFAIK.

Comment 3

[jsmeix]

I would like to mention my comment:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219682#c2

Comment 4

[Peter Mueller]

The File is filtered (see the following output from the CUPS logfile):

D [17/Oct/2003:12:30:04 +0200] start_process("/usr/lib/cups/filter/ogonki",
0xbffef970, 0xbffeece0, 9, 11, 8)
D [17/Oct/2003:12:30:04 +0200] start_process("/usr/lib/cups/filter/pstops",
0xbffef970, 0xbffeece0, 10, 12, 8)
D [17/Oct/2003:12:30:04 +0200] start_process("/usr/lib/cups/filter/cupsomatic",
0xbffef970, 0xbffeece0, 9, 11, 8)

I tried to let cups convert the file into PS Level 1 but without success. But If
I convert the file with ps2ps -dLanguageLevel=1 then everything is fine.

The printer is a HP LaserJet 4050, which supports ps Level 3.

Comment 5

[Roland Mainz]

Usual solution for the problem - use Mozilla's Xprint module for printing (see
http://xprint.mozdev.org/ and http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xprint/) ...

Comment 6

[Wolfgang Rosenauer [:wolfiR]]

Xprint seems to be a workaround and no solution. I never heared of an application
other than mozilla that uses it. Nevertheless the availability of Xprint module
is no reason to make the Postscript module more and more useless IMHO.

Comment 7

[Federico Mena-Quintero]

Isn'g this a duplicate of bug #107756 or bug #176938?

Comment 8

[Hiro]

depend or dup bug279298 ?

Comment 9

[Kenneth Herron]

Peter, is this still an issue with current versions of mozilla (or firefox or
thunderbird)? The PS module's postscript generator has undergone a lot of
changes since this was filed.

Comment 10

[Ian Jackson]

I'm the Firefox maintainer for Ubuntu, and we're using 1.0.7 in our forthcoming
release (codenamed Breezy).  I have a comment that seems relevant, although I'm
not 100% sure.  I'll be replying in 234182 too.

We had a bug http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10293 regarding the
appearance (depending on configuration) of - instead of the desired document - a
bizarre page with runic instructions to mess about with gs pswrite.

We didn't consider this acceptable, so we are configuring our firefox (which
always uses CUPS for printing) to always ask CUPS to prefilter the PostScript. 
This may give suboptimal output under some conditions but at least it always
produces the desired printout!

Comment 11

[Ian Jackson]

The new printing arrangements in 1.5 seem to have made the prefiltering unnecessary, so I think this bug can be closed now.

Comment 12

[Kenneth Herron]

Closing based on comment 11, lack of other responses to comment 9, and general lack of "printing through cups hasn't worked for the past two years" bug reports.