PCL6/XL driver pxlcolor unable to print some PDF documents

[Lionel Dricot]

Binary package hint: foomatic-db

I use a LAN Xerox workcenter 7345. The current default driver is PCL6/XL pxlcolor.

This driver is unable to print some characters in some PDF files. The first pages are fine but when this unindentified character happens, the printing is stopped and a page with the following is printed :

ERROR
SubSystem: KERNEL
Error: IllegalTag
Operator: 0x3
Position: 15 (this depends of the document, of course)

The workaround is to print the PDF in a PS file then print that PS (which works fine).

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

The attached PDF contains the problem at page 6. If you try to print that page alone, you will receive the error at position 15.

If you try to print the whole document, 5 first pages will be fine then you will have the error at position 30717.

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

Adding ghostscript as it might be like bug #282738

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

Also, I want to add that that bug was probably not present in Intrepid (at least, I don't remember)

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

I discover that buggy PDF can still be printed by XPDF without problem. It looks like the problem is in the gnome-printing-system then.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Please check whether you can print from evince (Document Viewer) with other printer drivers. For example create a second queue for your printer, choosing the "Generic PCL5c printer" as printer model and "hpijs-pcl5c" as driver, or install the "cups-pdf" package, then print to the "PDF" queue and see the results in ~/PDF.

Also try a live CD of Lucid, as in Lucid's Ghostscript a bunch of fixes for the pxlcolor driver got applied.

Please report your results here.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

This is most probably a bug in the built-in driver in Ghostscript. If the fixes in Lucid do not solve the problem, please report a bug directly to the Ghostscript developers via http://bugs.ghostscript.com/, but note that http://bugs.ghostscript.com/ has died and it will take some days until a replacement is set up.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

http://bugs.ghostscript.com/ is up and running again. Please report the problem there and post a link here. Thanks.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Closing foomatic-db task, as the problem seems to be in Ghostscript and not in the selection of the correct driver for the given printer.

Please post a bug report at http://bugs.ghostscript.com/ and post the link to your bug report here.

[Murray Cumming (murrayc)]

Why not have an Ubuntu bug for ghostscript?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Murray Cumming, this bug is not a problem of Ubuntu's packaging and patching of Ghostscript but a problem in the Ghostscript code itself, which was written by the Ghostscript developers at Artifex (upstream developers). These do not see Ubuntu bugs but only bugs in Ghostscript's own bug tracking system. In addition, the problem does not only affect Ubuntu, but every operating system which uses Ghostscript for printing. Therefore the bug needs to get fixed by the Ghostscript developers.

[Murray Cumming (murrayc)]

Yes, but it's usual to have disto bugs that track upstream bugs, I believe.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

The distro bug is this one, the upstream bug is the bug which you are supposed to post on http://bugs.ghostscript.com/.

[Murray Cumming (murrayc)]

Sorry, I don't personally know how to tell the ghostscript people how to reproduce the problem in terms of just ghostscript.

[Joakim Lundborg (joakim-lundborg)]

This bug is fixed for me in Lucid, using pxlcolor driver for a Dell 3100cn. I previously got this error:
ERROR
    SubSystem: KERNEL
    Error: IllegalOperatorSequence
    Operator: SetClipMode
    Position: 1473

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I do not know what actually fixed this problem, either a bunch of PCL-XL driver fixes which got applied in Ghostscript 8.71 or the removal of ugly Foomatic workarounds for paper tray selection (the paper tray selection of Ghostscript's built-in PCL drivers I have fixed some time ago). Marking as fixed in both ghostscript and foomatic-db...