[Scribus] Printing tabloid landscape to Laserjet 5SiMx - Help!

[Steve Jacobs]

On 10:20:57 pm 03/10/06 "John Jordan" <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> On 11 Mar 2006, at 15:53, Dean McCorquodale wrote:
>
> >  What breed of printer.
>
> Laserjet 5SiMx. Hewlett Packard sold several billions of these
> things. OK, that was an exaggeration. But they are extremely
> common as workgroup printers in corporate offices. In fact, it would
> not surprise me if it was in the top five in total number of printers
> sold in all history of laser printing. That's why I am surprised that
> Linux has problems printing to it.
>
> >  Does cups allow requested page size?
>
> 11x17 is not listed anywhere in CUPS or in any Scribus print dialog
> box. And both CUPS and the Scribus paper size box list all kinds
> of sizes and dimensions that I have never heard of, and which are
> not supported by this printer. (It does just US letter, legal, 11x17
> and European A3 and A4, plus various envelope sizes.)
>
> If I print from OO.o I get a proper listing of paper sizes.
>
> >  Trying different printer driver may help.
>
> There is only one driver available for this printer. It is a genuine
> Adobe PostScript level 2 printer. The PPD file is properly installed
> (as far as I know).
>
> Thanks for the suggestions.

Still, the fact that cups reports the wrong paper sizes for the printer
suggests that it's reading the wrong ppd or the ppd contains the wrong
information. Scribus is unlikely to print very dependably unless it gets
the the right printer information from cups via the ppd.

In my experience, an 11x17 landscape is far and away more likely to confuse
a laserjet than any other print job. I have no idea why this is so. A ppd
which is just plain wrong will often seem to work fine until you feed it an
11x17 landscape.

If in fact there is no other ppd to try, I'd do one of these things:

1. Grab a ppd (from linuxprinting.org or wherever) for some other laserjet
that describes same resolution and paper sizes. Maybe another lj5
incarnation.

2. Open the ppd in a text editor, scroll down to the paper size
declarations, and manually change them to the right values. I've done this
before and it often works. Don't forget to restart cups when you're done.

Regards,

Steve


Steve Jacobs
Steve Jacobs & Associates
Trinidad, CO US