trinity-users@lists.pearsoncomputing.net

Message: previous - next
Month: September 2015

kpdf vs big document= odd failure

From: Gene Heskett <gheskett@...>
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2015 12:32:48 -0400
Greetings all;

As has been mentioned, I dabble in CNC machinery too.  Maybe that 
qualifies me as a power user since the motors used to run the machinery 
do spin the power meter up a bit. :)

Anyway, the most recent version of the documentation for LiniuxCNC, 
version 2.7.0, has been combined from 3 "books" of nominally 450 pages 
each, some of which contained duplicate info, into one 704 page tome 
now.  

So I called up kpdf and sent it to print this, duplex mode on my Brother 
HL3170CDW color laser printer.

It immediately jumped one core to 100%, but I figured that would take it 
a while to preprocess.  But after about 10 minutes I began to worry 
because I had started that job once before but had to reboot the machine 
for other reasons before it had sent a wakeup byte to the printer.

So I called up a copy of iceweasel to see what 
localhost:631/printers/network-printer had to say for itself.  Which was 
that the "pdftops" filter had failed.

So I canceled the job.  Thirty seconds later, the printer wakes up and 
starts slowly spitting out the printout as requested.  But I have no 
clue how many pages into the document it will get before running out of 
data because it is about 30 sheets of paper into the job, and still 
trucking along in duplex mode. The printer is rated at 20 PPM, but in 
duplex, all that paper handling cuts it to about 2 or 3 sheets a minute.

When it dies, I can restart the job at an arbitrary page number to finish 
the job of course, but I am curious why the web interface to cups would 
report the failure of the pdftops filter, yet it looks to be working 
well right this instant?

But then it reported a drum error, please slide the wire cleaner gismo's 
on all 4 drums.  Did, it spit out the bad page and reprinted a good copy 
of that page.  And 34 pages of preamble index etc, plus over 100 pages 
of the 704 in the doc so far.  Did I mention I love Brother printers 
yet? 

But whats with kpdf?  Inquiring minds would like to know.

Thanks everybody.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>