Xara printing on FC6 is broken

[Bobby]

As my first post here I want to acknowledge how well Xara works under Linux. Very few glitches and great features. It is now my default text processing application! Thank you!

Having said that, I can print to either of my printers from any application except Xara. (Using CUPS.)

One printer is a b&w laser (Dell P1500) and the other is a color inkjet (Epson RX500). Choosing the Epson as a default printer in CUPS results in a blank page being ejected except for the the escape code IB.

Having chosen the P1500 once it does not matter if I change it to the RX500 as it will continue to print to the P1500. This is only true for Xara, using KMail prints fine to either printer, before and after printing from Xara.

Since it does work with other apps its appears that the problem lies with Xara's method of sending data to the printer.

Now looking at the escape code it might also be that I don't have ghostscript running properly. Though it does not explain why it always chooses the P1500.

Using KGhostView worked fine with a pdf doc. Testing an eps file shows that there is a problem in ghostview. First it cannot print eps files and asks to convert it, which crashes gs. Choosing sending it through to the printer resulted in a PCL XL error from the Kernel saying illegal attribute.

Of course RH is known for making improvements to various programs before shipping them, sometimes breaking things.

The odd thing is that if I use CUPS to send a test page it uses ESP Ghostscript without any problems. It tells me that the postscript interpreter is Level 3 version 3010 (81503).

Could it be that ESP Ghostscript is different than gs?

Printing to file with Xara reveals that it is running ESP Ghostscript 81503 too:

---------------------
ERROR: /undefined
in m

Operand stack:
--nostringval-- 1024 919
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval--
--nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1 3
%oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringv
al-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1125/1686(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)--
--dict:111/200(L)-- --dict:0/300(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
ESP Ghostscript
815.03
:
Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
---------------------

It does indeed look like Xara's ps is not compatible with at least this version of Ghostscript, though being that Xara is still in development I suspect that's the problem. Well again, almost. I tried to print a hylafax example cover page and it was the one crashing earlier.

The only thing that seem really clear is that Xara and ghostscript has some issue.

[PatJr]

Hello Bobby,
So can you give me any pointers on how to set FC5 to work with Hylafax?

I have failed at several attempts and just can't figure it out. Maybe there is a tutorial on fedoraforums or something? I couldn't find it.

I tried printing from Xara on FC5 to my ps printer sitting on an lpr print server. Instant crash. I couldn't get Xara to print to anything. I tried the bitmap mode too and it crashed immediately. I tried the pdf creation. Looks like it rasters everything and spits out a massive bitmap for the pdf. Have you tried OpenOffice Draw? It's a bit clunky but it does work very well, and it prints and exports beautify. Xara does have some very nice features, but it looks like the Linux branch has been pruned.

Thanks,
Pat Jr.

[Bobby]

Sorry, you will need to read the hylafax documentation. Xara _should_ just output the information. Hylafax _should_ listen to the printer port.
I've not seen any replies from them either so who knows what is really going on here.

Unices are usually not too hard to troubleshoot as it is built on the principle that everything can talk to everything. Often you can telnet and tell it on what port to talk on and see what replies you get. You just need to know what it expects.

In this case Xara should output data, which should then be picked up by your print server. Usually you can monitor these from the shell. I'm sorry I can't spend more time on helping you. Read up on lpr, lpq, cups.

[PatJr]

Hello Bobby,
Thanks for the tips.
Me guesses that printing is pouched in Lx?

Looking forward to FC7,
Pat Jr.