Description of Problem: Printing a 70-line text file loses lines 62-65 Printing a 90-column text file loses columns 81-90 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fresh redhat-8.0 install, plus updates from website as of 2002-10-28 How Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RedHat 8.0 2. Configure HP DeskJet 920c 3. Print a 69-line, 90 column text file (included) Actual Results: Lines 62-65 don't get printed, and the second page starts with line 66. Column 81 is half-printed, and nothing more. Expected Results: If I print a text file, I want to see the entire text file; missing lines of text is a bad thing. And long lines should wrap. Additional Information:
Created attachment 82364 [details] Test print file, plain text showing lines and columns
I used redhat-config-printer-gui to set up the printer.
I'm an idiot. After much debugging and changing of various shell scripts, I discovered that the paper size was set to 'A4' in redhat-config-printer-gui, not 'US Letter'. Postscript output looks perfect now.
Ummm.... I closed the wrong bug. Fixing the paper size fixed bug 76856. After fixing the paper size, I'm only losing a single line of text, line 66. And I'm attaching an improved test file.
Created attachment 83624 [details] Improved ASCII printer test page, designed to show data loss.
Are you using 'convert text to postscript'?
Yes. The HP Deskjet 920c (el cheapo inkjet printer, but better than other brands) uses its own private language to do graphics, and so ghostscript (gs) calls hpijs in order to print. LPRng is taking my text file, running mpage on it (to make it postscript), then ghostscript (to make it a bitmap), then hpijs (to make it into the printer language). Mpage breaks the page at 66 lines, which is the normal number of lines per page. Per US Letter page, I should say. There is a database (XML) that foomatic looks at to determine the number of pixels the printer can handle horizontally and vertically. It gets passed on to ghostscript and hpijs.
Did you try unsetting that option?
This printer doesn't accept plain text. It can't handle it.
So no, I didn't try unsetting that option.
Umm.... do you have good recipe for crow? Apparently the printer can handle plain text. I can now print 60 lines per page, and it doesn't lose any lines between pages. That said, I would rather get 66 lines per page, like all the other printers out there. I guess if the spacing between lines were just a smidgen smaller, or if the font were a tad smaller, the 66th line would fit. Mpage converts ascii to postscript in 66-line pages, and hands that off to ghostscript and hpijs to deal with. The silent truncation of those postscript pages is the problem.
The lines-per-inch can be changed easily with CUPS, so I consider this problem addressed in rawhide.