[Foomatic] Bugus print with Lexmark E210/300dpi

Grant Taylor gtaylor+foodev_baibf030104 at picante.com
Mon Mar 1 10:25:00 PST 2004


Marcelo Ricardo Leitner <mrl at conectiva.com.br> writes:

> I'm using this printer with cups+foomatic and it is configurated directly
> through foomatic-configure. What happens is that I can't print with 300dpi
> resolution, but I can do it via Windows. The other resolutions seems to be
> ok.
> 
> When printing at 300dpi I got a "quaked" print. I have one test page scanned
> over here http://bugzilla.conectiva.com.br/attachment.cgi?id=882&action=view
> and the page that should have been printed
> http://bugzilla.conectiva.com.br/attachment.cgi?id=906&action=view

> Any ideas of what could be happening?

Hmm.  This *might* be a bug caused by my compression bug workaround.

The printer (in "smartgdi" mode, which is the only documented mode for
Samsung non-PCL printers) accepts a series of bands of compressed
bitmap data.  Each band must be 64KB or smaller.

For bands which are larger than 64KB, there is a problem, as we have
only the one known compression method.  So my workaround "fuzzes" the
original print data and recompresses.  Basically it subtracts
horizontal resolution iteratively until the band "fits" when
compressed.  This is visible (mainly in dithered areas) as half-inch
sized horizontal distortions on prints.

That said, your image doesn't really look like the distortion my hack
introduces.  And many if not all parts of that test page should print
without triggering my hack; usually only data like full-page-width f-s
dithered areas don't compress adequately.  Ghostscript's internal
halftoning is coarser than a straight 300dpi f-s dither, and rarely
causes this issue.

I would suspect some other sort of problem, perhaps a resolution
problem of some sort; I have never used the driver much at 300dpi.

Which exact driver version are you using?  The only way to really tell
is probably to obtain the matching sources for your install
ghostscript and inspect the gsdevgdi.c source directly.  Unless a
Connectiva person can volunteer what they ship...

We should also verify that the driver is the problem and not foomatic
(which has an increasing number of scarey driver output postprocessing
features).  Can you print a 300dpi page successfully by invoking
ghostscript directly from the command line into your printer's /dev
node?

-- 
Grant Taylor - gtaylor<at>picante.com - http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/
   Linux Printing Website and HOWTO:  http://www.linuxprinting.org/



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