On Saturday 12 September 2015 17:32:48 Gene Heskett wrote:
> 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.

This is 6 years old:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/pdf_as_standard_print_job_format

Why do you need a filter to print pdf?  Is it because your printer is very 
old? Do you know?  Does anyone else?

Lisi

>
> 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