Page Ejection Issue - Gutenprint Driver

[tomstrong]

Hello,

I have an Epson Stylus C64 connected to my PC running Kubuntu 7.10. I have tried the CUPS/Gutenprint 5.01 and the Foomatic Gutenprint ijs 5.0 drivers, and they do a great job of printing, but neither will eject the final page of a print job. I have to switch the printer off and back on to eject the page and reset it for another job. When you switch an Epson off and back on, it does a mini-cleaning cycle and uses up quite a bit of ink in the process.

I have seen several posts about this problem, but have not seen anyone offer a solution.

Is there anyone out there in Linux land who has solved this problem? Perhaps someone involved in Gutenprint development?

Tom Weeks

[SheeEttin]

Re: Page Ejection Issue - Gutenprint Driver

Do you mean that the rollers are still holding the paper after it's finished printing?
I'm not familiar with the Stylus C64, however. You may need to keep that in mind.

[tomstrong]

Re: Page Ejection Issue - Gutenprint Driver

Do you mean that the rollers are still holding the paper after it's finished printing?
I'm not familiar with the Stylus C64, however. You may need to keep that in mind.

Yes, the rollers still hold the paper, stopping at the last line printed. The activity light continues to blink (I think this means that the printer is either not getting a FF (form-feed) , or an end-of-transmission (or both). Pressing the form-feed button ejects the page, but does not reset the printer (i.e., the the activity light continues to blink).
If another job is sent to the queue while the page from the first job is still in the printer, the printer begins printing on the sheet left over from the previous job on the next line after it stopped. If I use the form-feed button to eject the page, but do not switch the printer off and back on, nothing gets printed if another job is sent to the queue.

If a multi-page form is sent, all the pages before the final page are ejected, but the final page is not. If only one page is sent, the printer stops at the last line printed (as described above).

Tom Weeks

[SheeEttin]

Re: Page Ejection Issue - Gutenprint Driver

Does it have a cancel button?

[tomstrong]

Re: Page Ejection Issue - Gutenprint Driver

Does it have a cancel button?

The printer has three buttons. Each button has a light (LED) in its center. There is a power button which has a green LED. This LED is lit continuously when the printer is on and idle. When the printer is buffering data, printing, charging ink or otherwise engaged in some activity, the green led on the power button blinks. I have named the light on the power button the "activity light", although when it is not flashing it is simply an indicator of the power being "on".

The other two buttons have red LED's. One button moves the print head to the "change ink" position. When its LED is lit, it indicates that there is a problem with the ink supply. The other button with a red LED resumes printing if some error has occurred and been corrected. Its LED indicates out-of-paper and paper jam errors. Pressing this button when its LED is not lit causes the printer to do a form-feed (causes the paper to be fed out of the printer. It could probably be called a "cancel" button, but Epson does not call it this, and when this printer is connected to my Linux box, although pressing it does "eject" the paper, it obviously does not cancel the print job -- because the green "I'm still doing something here!" light continues to blink -- probably forever, if I don't switch the power off and back on.

When I print to this printer using the free TurboPrint driver, the last page of a print job IS ejected. But I can't get the TurboPrint driver to work over my home network using CUPS IP sharing (http://[ip address]:631/printers/[printer name]). I want to use the CUPS+Gutenprint 5.01 driver because it is free and open source and updates automatically, and because it works well with CUPS IP sharing over my home network.

Tom Weeks

[SheeEttin]

Re: Page Ejection Issue - Gutenprint Driver

Hmm.

File a bug report? The Gutenprint drivers use Sourceforge, project page here.