[OS X TeX] printer mistakes black for white

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 16 déc. 06 à 20:29, Friedrich Vosberg a écrit :

> I've scanned some sheets and saved it as PDF files. When I print  
> these files, all sheets that only contain black and white are  
> inverted. Sheets that contain colours are printed all right.
>
> I use an MBP C2D MacOS X 10.4.8 and a Xerox Phaser 3500. The result  
> is indepent from which application I start the print job. In all  
> cases the preview of the print document is okay. And when I print  
> from Adobe Acrobat Standard 7 and use »print as picture/image«  
> black and white are not inverted.
>
> What could be the reason?

The problem is probably different in your case, but here's a  
configuration in which I've been faced with a similar problem.

The printers at work are managed by a CUPS server running on a Debian  
Linux machine. I can print either by connecting directly to them via  
AppleTalk, or by attacking the corresponding queue on the server. One  
way to do the latter is edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf by adding the line

	BrowsePoll [ip-of-the-cups-server]:631

such that when you open Printer Setup Utility and ask to add a  
printer, all the printing queues managed by the server are added to  
the list  of available printers (with "Shared Printer" in the  
Connection column).

However, when doing this and printing various files to this queue,  
the output exhibits problems similar to those you're reporting:

- The white background of some TIFF files is turned to black (as for  
the paper clip icon and the Save button accompanying attachments in  
message headers in Mail.app).

- In PDF files (such as those produced by Keynote) containing  
included images and possibly included PDF files, the transparency of  
some images is lost, some other images are printed in "reverse  
video", and some of the included PDF files have their fonts  
substituted and possibly the encoding of these fonts mixed up.

None of these problems appears when dialoging directly with the  
printer via AppleTalk. (The reason for preferring using the CUPS  
server is that our sysadmins have created "virtual" printer queues or  
classes sending jobs indifferently to several printers with automatic  
load balancing between these printers; as far as I know AppleTalk  
cannot be used with such printer classes.)

I've attempted to isolate the cause of the problem (our sysadmins  
aren't really interested in Macs, due to lack of time), and I can  
only think of two causes:

- A bug in the CUPS server on the Linux machine.

- An incorrect PPD file for the printer. In this case the printer is  
a HP LaserJet 4050, and the PPD selected on the CUPS server is "HP  
LaserJet 4050 Foomatic/Postscript" while the PPD selected for  
AppleTalk is that included in OS X, namely, on Tiger, "/Library/ 
Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/HP LaserJet 4050  
Series.gz". The Foomatic PPD comes, I suppose, from LinuxPrinting  
<http://www.freestandards.org/en/OpenPrinting/Database/Foomatic>, and  
it must be either too old, or improperly installed, or bugged, or  
incompatible with OS X.

I think the most likely cause in your case is incorrect PPD  
selection. Did you install the vendor-supplied PPD for your printer,  
and did you select it when adding the printer in Printer Setup  
Utility? This PPD doesn't seem to be included in OS X, but you should  
be able to get it from

<http://www.support.xerox.com/go/results.asp? 
Xtype=download&prodID=3500&Xlang=en_US&Xcntry=USA&source=XOG>

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin



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