[Suns-at-Home] PPD file for HP-4050N printer needed for StarOffice 5.2 on Sparc box

[Craig Dewick]

I now have my HP-4050N laser printer connected to my local network via
it's JetDirect card and (somewhat successfully) configured into the 'lp'
printing system with the following entries in '/etc/printers.conf':


#
#       If you hand edit this file, comments and structure may change.
#       The preferred method of modifying this file is through the use of
#       lpset(1M)
#
hplaser:\
        :bsdaddr=ziri,hplaser,Solaris:\
        :user-equivalence=false:
_default:\
        :use=hplaser:


I have just installed StarOffice 5.2 on this machine (it's a Sparc 20
running Solaris 8 btw) and it works well, except that getting the printer
to work properly is currently a bugbear.

Using the 'spadmin' utility I have no problems printing out the test page
using StarOffice's generic printer driver once it's set for the right
paper size, but printing out a real document fails. This works regardless
of whether I run 'spadmin' when I'm logged in as root or my user account.

I have created some simple text documents using some of the sample
templates as starting points, but when I select 'print', check the
printing options are set the way I want (limited by having to use the
generic driver), and actually start off the print job, the postscript file
is fired off to the printer (it receives the file as I can watch the
activity LED and the job ID is reported back via a dialog box) but nothing
is printed and the printer just drops back in the 'ready' mode.

I have even tried printing to a file and manually printing using 'lp -d
hplaser testfile.ps' and the result is the same, so something must be
wrong with the postscript code that StarOffice is generating.

Could this be related to not having an appropriate PPD file available? I'm
a little stumped about why the test page prints fine out of 'spadmin' but
a real document fails.

Any ideas?

I've got HP's webjetadmin software installed, and if I bring up the 'print
jobs' page for my printer, it clearly shows the jobs sent from StarOffice,
but the page count for the attempts to print any of the test documents
I've created is always zero even though the status field says 'printed'
and the result field says 'ok'.

The test pages from 'spadmin' show 1 page printed for each.

I configured the default print command to be 'lp -d hplaser', just as I
would type if I manually sent a postscript file off the printer from the
command line.

Regards,

Craig.

-- 
            Craig Dewick. Send email to "cdewick@lios.apana.org.au"
  Point a web browser at 'http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick/sun_shack.html' to
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