latex generated postscript prints bars over some characters

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

after upgrading from intrepid to jaunty I am facing a strange problem with printing latex generated documents: In most cases, my printer now prints little bars above 'large' characters, i.e. characters reaching the top of the Font bounding box, like uppercase letters and b,d,t,...

I first noticed that problem when printing letters generated with the komascript letter style, but I could track this down to pretty simple standard latex. See the attached .tex file.

Steps I did:

latex test.tex
dvips test.dvi
print the test.ps to a HP Laserjet 1300, cups configured to use the postscript driver, i.e. send the file as postscript and do not use hpijs to render it offline. Depending on the font used (it's even worse if I use postscript fonts with
\usepackage{times}
\def\rmdefault{\sfdefault}
) there are more or less bars. See the attached scan to give an example of how it looks like.

I verified that that problem is not caused by the jaunty latex package, because old postscript files (about a year old) generated with older ubuntu (probably hardy heron), that printed perfectly at that time, now shows the same problem.

As far as I can see by now, the problem is caused not by latex itself but by all those stuff cups tries to do with a given postscript file, even when the printer type is selected as postscript and one expects the printing system to pass the file unmodified to the printer. cups seems to do a lot of things with files like

/usr/lib/cups/filter/cpdftocps ...
/usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftopdf ...
/usr/lib/cups/filter/pstopdf ...

where somewhere in that chain something goes wrong.

BTW, I did not manage to call /usr/lib/cups/backend/hp without a segmentation fault. If you ever get a hand on that silly guy who designed cups to have the device URL passed as ARGV[0] instead of ARGV[1] to the backends, please do me a favour: beat him as hard as you can. And don't stop. It's unbelievable that there are backends that can't be called directly on the command line. I did not yet find a way to send the postscript file to the printer without cups. Once upon a time there used to be simple device entries.

regards
Hadmut

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

Would be very nice if there was at least a simple way to bypass cups and directly send files to USB printers unmodified.

regards

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

This is not related to latex. It also happens with other postscript/pdf files.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

This bug has already been reported, closing as a duplicate.
Please try the suggestions of printing expert Till Kamppeter in the other bug and report your finding there.