S
OLVING
PROBLEMS
6.24
I am using BSD lpr
(Slackware, Debian, older
distributions) and some
options chosen in LLPR
don’t seem to take effect.
Legacy BSD lpr systems have a hard limitation on the length
of the option string that can be passed to the printing system.
As such, if you selected a number of different options, the
limitation length of the options may be exceeded and some of
your choices won’t be passed to the programmes responsible
for implementing them. Try to select less options that deviate
from the defaults, to save on memory usage.
I am trying to print a
document in Landscape
mode, but it prints rotated
and cropped.
Most Unix applications that offer a Landscape orientation
option in their printing options will generate correct PostScript
code that should be printed as is. In that case, you need to
make sure that you leave the LLPR option to its default
Portrait setting, to avoid unwanted rotations of the page that
would result in a cropped output.
Some pages come out all
white (nothing is printed),
and I am using CUPS.
If the data being sent is in Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)
format, some earlier versions of CUPS (1.1.10 and before)
have a bug preventing them from being processed correctly.
When going through LLPR to print, the Printer Package will
work around this issue by converting the data to regular
PostScript. However, if your application bypasses LLPR and
feeds EPS data to CUPS, the document may not print
correctly.
I can’t print to a SMB
(Windows) printer.
To be able to configure and use SMB-shared printers (such as
printers shared on a Windows machine), you need to have a
correct installation of the SAMBA package that enables that
feature. The “smbclient” command should be available and
usable on your system.
My application seems to be
frozen while LLPR is
running.
Most Unix applications will expect a command like the regular
“lpr” command to be non-interactive and thus return
immediately. Since LLPR is waiting for user input before
passing the job on to the print spooler, very often the
application will wait for the process to return, and thus will
appear to be frozen (its windows won’t refresh). This is
normal and the application should resume functioning
correctly after the user exits LLPR.
How do I specify the IP
address of my SMB server?
It can be specified in the “Add Printer” dialogue of the
configuration tool, if you don’t use the CUPS printing system.
Unfortunately, CUPS currently doesn’t allow one to specify the
IP address of SMB printers, so you will have to be able to
browse the resource with Samba in order to be able to print.
Some documents come out
as white pages when
printing.
Some versions of CUPS, especially those shipped with
Mandrake Linux before the 8.1 release, have some known
bugs when processing the PostScript output from some
applications. Try upgrading to the latest version of CUPS (at
least 1.1.14). Some RPM packages for most popular
distributions are provided as a convenience with this Linux
Printing Package.
Problem Possible Cause and Solution