Re: HP 4MP printer driver current?

RobertB <missinglink@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <1iwtj5h.13ku47z13sskufN%dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson) wrote:

RobertB <missinglink@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <1iwru9x.1xhrhbo17tyylnN%dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson) wrote:

RobertB <missinglink@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This is interesting. If I save it (Print>Save As PDF) as a PDF in
Word, I can print it successfully from Acrobat Reader but not from
Preview (which seems to use an RTF version of the file), which
exhibits the same problem as Word. I can print the RTF file from
the G4, however (it's the only version I tried to print from
there).

I don't understand your RTF reference. When you print to a PDF, you
have a PDF file, not an RTF file. Preview or Adobe Reader would be
dealing with a PDF, and converting it back to an RTF would be a
rather difficult task (which would probably lose all structure of
the original document). Preview has no mechanism to do that. It can
only save as PDF or various image formats.

Well, Preview handles RTF files just fine. I'll have to double-check
this because it could have been an artifact of a previous version of the
file (RTF) not printing completely and appearing in the print queue.

Preview has nothing to do with RTF files. It cannot directly open them
or save them.

Hmm. I see it can open PostScript files as well as PDF. Not RTF though.

Postscript, PDF and a variety of image file formats (e.g. JPEG).

Preview handles a Postscript file by converting it to PDF, using
Ghostscript I believe (not genuine Adobe Postscript). If you want
"official" Postscript rendering, you need Adobe Acrobat (or at least
Adobe Distiller, which they may include with InDesign).

When Preview is involved in the print process, the original format of
the document (whether it be text, RTF, Word or anything else) doesn't
change anything as far as Preview is concerned. In all cases, the other
application has printed to PDF and Preview is opening a PDF. This
applies whether you explicitly save as PDF and then open the PDF in
Preview, or simply click the Preview button in the print dialog, or use
Preview to examine a document in a print queue.

So, in all cases, it converts to PDF.

Not exactly. The print mechanism always produces PDF, which you can open
in Preview.

If you open a JPEG or other image file in Preview, it is not converted
to PDF (unless you print it from Preview).

The name of the document appearing in the print queue might reference
the original document name (including its extension), but it is not in
the original format. It is a PDF.

That's interesting. Although I specifically saved the file in PDF
format.

The name that appears in the print queue is a job title, and most
applications would default to using the filename of the original
document, if they don't have a suitable title attribute to subtitute for
the document filename.

When you "Save as PDF" in the Print dialog, the default name might
happen to be the same as the document, including the wrong extension.

I don't have a 10.4.11 machine handy to try, but with 10.5.6, the
behaviour I get (from TextEdit) is:

- Open document in TextEdit with .rtf extension.

- File > Print > Save as PDF

- Default name which appears in the Save As dialog is the document name
(ending in .rtf).

- When I tell it to Save, I get an error message which says "You cannot
save this document with the extension '.rtf' at the end of the name. The
required extension is '.pdf'. You can choose to use both, so that your
file name ends in '.rtf.pdf'." (With buttons "Use both", "Cancel" and
"Use .pdf".)

I expect this is an improvement in 10.5, but 10.4 doesn't check and can
save PDFs with the wrong extension.

I'm guesssing the "EOF" message is something the printer software
identifies in the file at a location where it shouldn't be.

EOF is an abbreviation for "End Of File". The PDF to Postscript renderer
expected there to be more data in the file but it wasn't there. This is
probably due to it misinterpreting some element within the PDF which it
thought was supposed to contain more data than existed in the rest of
the file.

Interesting.

Rather than corruption, it could also be that the PDF output was
incomplete, but the document got sent to the print queue anyway.

Incomplete in what sense? Or rather, how?

In the sense that the PDF had only been partly written to disk, and
there was data missing at the end of it. When something else tried to
read it, more data was expected at the point the end of file was reached
(based on the size of the file in bytes, not anything written into the
file saying "this is the end").

Wouldn't that imply that the EOF code may have clipped the document when
generating the PDF (so Preview printed the same abbreviated document as
Word)?

There is no literal "EOF code" in the offending PDF. The PDF just wasn't
completely written.

There might have been some kind of document end marker in the Word
document, but it is unlikely to have anything to do with the incorrectly
generated PDF.

I'm still inclined to suspect a bug in the PDF output code and/or the
PDF to Postscript conversion code in 10.4.11 (both of which are part of
Mac OS X, not the application), which just happened to be triggered by a
specific pattern of output data generated by Word when you print that
document.

--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.