Printing Does Not Work for Some Files

Quantum

Got a pretty serious problem here, and maybe somebody has an idea.

This week when doing my dist-upgrade I was shocked to find my Debian Testing forced me into a KDE upgrade to 4.2.2. I reealy didn't want this as KDE4 is just not ready. But it is now too late.

I have a legal document that I MUST print. It's an OpenOffice .odt doc which printed fine in KDE3.5.10, but now all I get is blank pages on hardcopy. I print it from OpenOffice as I've always done, and in kdevmon I can see that there's virtually no network traffic going out, and so of course it would print blank.

Other .odt's print fine, but this crucial court-approved document will not. I've exported it to pdf, and "Oklular" shows it fine but also prints it blank. I am no longer allowed to install KPDF since KDE4, and xpdf brings up only about half the characters, and prints it blank. I used pdftops and opened the ps with Okular but the pages are blank. I am no longer allowed kghostview, of course.

Here's the problem document:
http://delphi-real-estate.com/Notice.odt

KDE4 is faster, but they should have freakin' given me some warning as it is still busted and I must get work done.

Any ideas?

james_h · Super User Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 883

You could try creating the PDF with Google Documents. You need to set up a free account. You could also try taking your PDF file to a print shop. Many can print from a PDF file. You can also try a Linux distribution that you can run off a CD-ROM or an external drive like Knoppix or Ubuntu. If you prefer Debian, then Debian stable may be a better choice than Debian testing for production work where stability and reliability are important.

Perhaps not all the packages downloaded correctly during your update. With root (administrator) rights, try:

Quantum · Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2009 12:27 pm Post subject:

Thanks James.

I would -never- trust Google with any work-related or personal docs. Their privacy policies are atrocious. I don't even use them for search. (Clusty.com)

Good idea to try a Live CD, I'll do that. But Debian Testing is every bit as stable as Stable, and Stable's packages are ancient. It's just this week that KDE4.2 was forced on me without warning when I did my dist-upgrade. Many things are now ruined because it is just not ready. Cost me two days of no work just to get KDE4 running.

apt-get -f install shows no problems. It says alot of files are no longer needed (yeah, sure) and it wants to remove them, so I'll try that.

I think there's something about that document that makes it betray me by displaying but not printing. I can not imagine what that is though. Other documents created at the same time print fine. The difference is this document was created by the court, and I imported it into OO.

james_h · Super User Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 883

You're welcome.
The gimp and Adobe Photoshop graphics editor programs will open PDF files and convert them to a bitmap. You could try importing the PDF, then printing the file using one of these programs.

Quantum · Posted: Sun Jun 07, 2009 8:23 am Post subject:

Yes printing from Gimp worked, although it printed at lower quality.

There is obviously some setting in the OpenOffice file that is causing this. What setting could there be that denies printing of visible text and graphics?

james_h · Super User Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 883

Usually, if there is a problem you can get more feedback about errors if you start the problem program from a console command line. The error messages that appear may tell you about missing fonts, display problems etc.

If you are using the CUPs printer system, you can send a PDF file directly from the command line.

james_h · Super User Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 883

You can view and even edit the settings and content of an OpenDocument format document manually by opening it with a .zip file reader and browsing the .xml files. With your Linux system, you could try temporarily renaming a copy of the Notice.odt file with a .zip extension (i.e.: Notice.zip) and opening it with your archive browser.

I examined your sample file, and noted that the settings.xml file is 9.2 MB instead of 8 MB for a normal default .odt document. Your settings.xml includes the following lines which are not included in the default settings.xml with normal documents:

Quantum · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 9:51 am Post subject:

It turns out that there was something screwed up with my Cups server. Must have been crashing, but then I'd restart the server and old items were in the queue that didn't print. I don't understand it. At least I know where to look now.

Thanks for the help James.

Quantum · Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 7:53 am Post subject:

I find that my cups server is retaining jobs, showing them as stopped, even when they've printed. I don't know what to do about that.

I tried lp Notice.pdf and it printed one page blank, just as OO had from the odt, even though I can see all the type on my screen. And I can see all the text when I view the exported pdf in Okular (PDF viewer), but it simply sends out nothing to the printer when I print.

So the problem must be in the translation of the postscript in the odt and pdf, to the postscript of the printer. Almost as if the doc security is set to No Print, but I don't think we have that option in OO, or at least it would warn us rather than just printing a blank page.

I have found that if I export the doc to pdf, and print it with Force Rasterize, it comes out just fine. This is a tremendous relief, as now I can get better quality, and pages after the first. I thought I'd have to pay OfficeDepot to print my docs.

I am finding that I get this syndrome on other official pdf documents downloaded from The Internets, which is alarming, but at least I have a workaround.