Comment 23 for bug 902535

I have checked your current files and came to the following conclusion:

The general, device-independent CUPS filters which come with Ubuntu (pdftopdf, gstoraster, ghostscript, ...) do their job of preparing and rasterizing the document for printing correctly. I have tested it by running the captured PDF files which you have attached through Ghostscript, using the command lines from your attached error_log files.

The closed-source printer driver filter supplied by Lexmark does bi-directional communication with the printer through the "usb" CUPS backend. If the driver is used with a file as output, the first bidirectional request does not get answered by the printer and the driver errors out after having sent 33 bytes of commands ("E [12/Dec/2011:19:39:27 +0000] [Job 72] Printer Error. The printer cannot communicate with the computer." in your 2nd_cups_error_log). This means that it is not possible to get the complete output of the Lexmark driver into a file to print it to the actual printer unfiltered in a separate step.

The error caused by the printer not answering as we are printing into a file:

E [12/Dec/2011:19:39:27 +0000] [Job 72] Printer Error. The printer cannot communicate with the computer.

The driver filter errored out but closed with 0 exit status and therefore CUPS does not know that there is an error:

D [12/Dec/2011:19:40:01 +0000] PID 5564 (/usr/local/lexmark/legacy/bin/printfilter) exited with no errors.

So CUPS did not kill the other filters and so gstoraster (the wrapper around Ghostscript) tries to carry on rasterizing the data and errors out because the process supposed to take its output data disappeared:

D [12/Dec/2011:19:40:01 +0000] PID 5563 (/usr/lib/cups/filter/gstoraster) stopped with status 13.