It appears that the deskjet 500c filter in the 5.2 distribution does not work correctly when configured to print BW. I struggled with this a bit only to find that 1) the color mode worked fine 2) the non-color deskjet filter works fine for BW (this was my workaround) 3) if I use the 500C filter it works okay for BW text, but when handed postscript gs appears to balk with the error: Unrecoverable error: rangecheck in .putdeviceprops (1488) op_array(486)0x817b0d4:E... (after the E falls off the page - sorry)
don't use 1bpp. Use 8bpp instead. (that's still B&W). The ghostscript driver suddenly became broken.
at some point I'll attempt to fix ghostcript, when I have copious amounts of free time, or a better understanding of the ghostscript code. Until then, this falls under a 'don't do that.'
Bill, what is the status of this currently??
the ghostscript driver is still doesn't like to be configured for 1bpp, AFAIK. Haven't looked at it recently. New installs won't be configured to use it; upgrades could run into this issue though.