[CentOS] printer only prints one page, if anything

Warren Young

warren at etr-usa.com
Thu Nov 14 02:56:02 UTC 2019


On Nov 13, 2019, at 6:42 PM, H <agents at meddatainc.com> wrote:
> 
> Anyone else has the same problem? How do I research this? 

I don’t have any specific guidance for you, but I can tell you what’s happening.

The PDF document is being rasterized before being printed, and then some stage along the line is dithering the rasterized form to spread out the errors (aliasing) that occur when you rasterize vector art — which includes virtually all printed text!

The fix therefore is to either:

1. If printing to B&W, rasterize to the printer’s native resolution in 1-bit B&W, not to grayscale.  If you rasterize to the wrong resolution, it has to be resized which usually creates grayscale, and if you rasterize to the right resolution but it's antialiased, it still won’t print sharply.

2. Send it through to the printer to be rasterized there instead.  The most durable form is Postscript, but if you don’t have a Postscript capable printer, or if it’s just too slow on that mode, pick the right language.

The trick is finding out which of the above failure modes is happening in your case.  There’s probably 2-4 stages in the CentOS printing process where data is handed off from one process to another before it hits the actual printer, and they can all be doing these sorts of mistranslation.

That’s why Postscript was such a great idea: the producing application wrote out the Postscript rendition of the doc, and it was just sent as unprocessed data until it hit the printer, no reinterpretation along the way.


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