Shifted printing with Brother MFC-260C

[Olivier Berten]

Binary package hint: brother-cups-wrapper-extra

When I print to my Brother MFC-260C printer, the page gets shifted to the top. See attachment.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Which version of Ubuntu are you using? Did you apply all the updates? If after applying the udates you still have the problem, please follow the instructions of bug 382379:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/382379/comments/9
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/382379/comments/10
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27756321/pdftops

Does this help?

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

Your patch doesn't seem to change anything.

Attached error_log

I'm using a clean Jaunty (netbook) install with all updates. But I had the same problem on my Hardy->Intrepid->Jaunty+updates computer.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Did you get actually something printed? In your error_log the Brother driver has crashed:

D [15/Jun/2009:16:35:15 +0200] [Job 6] *** stack smashing detected ***: /usr/Brother/Printer/mfc260c/cupswrapper/brcupsconfpt1 terminated

(after this line there are several additional lines for debugging this crash) If you did not get the complete document printed, attach the document and try to print another document to investigate the shift.

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

The result is exactly like the first attachment. I tried again a few minutes later after rebooting the computer, the result is always the same.

The fact that it crashes and then resumes may explain the fact that the beginning of the page doesn"t get printed...

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

If this is a black-and-white laser printer, can you try whether choosing "Brother HL-1040" as model and "hl7x0" as driver solves your problem?

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

Brother MFC-260C is a multifunction inkjet printer

http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/BSC/public/eu/eu_ot/en/model_top/colormfc/mfc260c_eu_as.html?reg=eu&c=eu_ot&lang=en&prod=mfc260c_eu_as

[Crispin Veall (crispin)]

Just to add that exactly the same occurs with the Brother DCP135C (printing shifted up by exactly the same amount). This was working fine up until about 2 weeks ago (can't be more specific I'm afraid).

[Crispin Veall (crispin)]

Hmm, added the proposed repo and added cups and poppler as suggested. That stopped printing all together. I then reverted to cups 1.3.9-17ubuntu3.1 and all works ok again - including proper alignment. I'm running with libpoppler 0.10.5-1ubuntu2

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Crispin Veall, are you sure to have installed all needed packages from -proposed. The needed binary packages are cups, poppler-utils, and libpoppler4. Installation of cups should pull all the other mentioned packages. Please try to update from -proposed again and take care that everything needed gets installed. Please run the command

dpkg -l cups libpoppler4 poppler-utils | cat

You will get information about the currently installed versions of the mentioned packages. cups must be 1.3.9-17ubuntu3.2 and libpoppler4 and poppler-utils must both be 0.10.5-1ubuntu2.2. If these versions are not correct. Make sure that jaunty-proposed is included in your package repositories and that you have updated completely. Update again if needed.

After that try to print again. Please provide an error_log following the instructions in the "CUPS error_log" section of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingPrintingProblems

[Crispin Veall (crispin)]

I did:
aptitude -t jaunty-proposed install cups
which then had a dependency on what I *think* was just 'poppler', not libpoppler4 or poppler-utils. I assumed that poppler was a metapackage.
The fact that it installed cups 1.3.9-17ubuntu3.2 suggests that I do have the correct repo set up.

I'll try again this evening and gather as much version information as I can, as well as an error_log.

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

Still not working with the latest version of cups (1.3.9-17ubuntu3.2)

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

As of today, with the latest version of Karmic, it still hasn't changed.

[Chris Parker (mrcsparker)]

I have the same problem with my machine. I am running an x86_64 machine trying to connect to a Brother model mfc440cn.

I am running Karmic with all the current patches

[David Ayers (ayers)]

I have the same issue with the default karmic repostories (main/universe/restricted/multiverse). Then I added archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ karmic partner and karmic-proposed and upgraded all packages, with identical results.

The offset from the top should be increased by 3-3.5 cm.

BTW: Thanks for providing the packages! And I think it's really great that the printers are detected an configured after the packages are installed and the system is rebooted.

I've downloaded the source package as I was hoping to easily contribute German translations to the driver configuration interface but couldn't the correct files. Just lots of debs... I guess those are the brother provided debs, and there seems to be no community project to contribute to.

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

An interesting point is that there isn't any problem if you choose letter format instead of A4.

[Jan Hrdina (jan-hrdina)]

Hi, I've got DCP-135c printer - the same problem. I just tried to reinstall "cups" package, turn off and on printer and it works fine without offset. I've got installed Ubuntu 9.10 64bit with all updates.

[Andreas Modinos (blueturtl)]

I can confirm this bug on Lucid Lynx Alpha (DCP-135C):

cups 1.4.2-9
poppler-utils 0.12.4-0ubuntu1
libpoppler4 (not installed)

My test page looks exactly like the one Olivier Berten got on his MFC-260C:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/40922533/dcp-135c_testpage_lucid_alpha.jpg

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

Still the same on a clean install of Lucid beta1

[Andreas Modinos (blueturtl)]

Olivier,

have you tried 'sudo brprintconf_mfc260c -pt A4'?

When I initially encountered alignment problems with my printer (this was on Ubuntu 7.10) I was using drivers from the Brother website. These drivers are divided into the actual driver (LPR) and the cups wrapper which makes the LPR driver communicate with the CUPS printing system. Anyway, I discovered that the printer settings in CUPS were decoupled from the ones in the LPR driver. The only way I could get the printer to obey the page size and print within proper margins at that time was to use the LPR driver utility to set the page size. This is the command in question.

[Andreas Modinos (blueturtl)]

No need to install drivers from the Brother site, the command should work with the drivers from the repositories since the brprintconf utilities appear to be present. I will post my own results tomorrow.

[Olivier Berten (olivier-berten)]

That made the trick! Thanks a lot :-)

But I won't consider that bug as fixed since I would need to do this every time I want to print on another paper size. This should be automatic.

[Andreas Modinos (blueturtl)]

I think this bug's duplicate status is incorrect. While the symptoms of bug 293832 fit, the problem didn't go away for the original reporter (nor myself) before running the brprintconf utility.

I have filed a new report for this as bug 550764 and nominated it for Lucid.