LaserJet 4000 and its inferior PostScript interpreter

Question

I have one of HP's older LaserJet printers (specifically, model 4000). It's supposed to understand PostScript, but it will frequently refuse to print things that other printers, evince, and ghostscript are all perfectly happy with. I used to be able to work around this by running everything through ps2ps with the output language level forced to 1, but this week I have a document that even that's not good enough for; it prints two pages of 11 and gives up. If I manually feed the document to the printer on TCP port 9100 so I can see errors (rather than using a print spooler) I get this:

%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: ⬜ ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end of file) will be ignored ]%%

where that ⬜ should be the 'no such character in this font' dingbat. Needless to say, there are no non-ASCII characters anywhere in the file. The document that's immediately a problem is pdfTeX output, but I've also had these problems with printing from Firefox, Inkscape, and OpenOffice (all of which, IIRC, use cairo to generate PostScript, so perhaps that's not as big of a sample as one would think). This is not a print spooler issue, I get the same problems feeding the printer by hand with netcat.

Can anyone suggest general troubleshooting tactics for this kind of problem, and/or a way to rewire the damn thing so it is less finicky about its input?

Answer 1

You say Ghostscript has no problem with the file? Ok, then try this:

First Option:

1. first convert it to PDF, and
2. then print the PDF (the normal way via spooler).

Here's a Ghostscript commandline (for Windows) that will create a PDF:

gswin32c.exe ^
     -dBATCH ^
     -dNOPAUSE ^
     -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
     -dSAFER ^
     -r600x600 ^
     -dFIXEDMEDIA ^
     -sDEFAULTPAPERSIZE=a4 ^
     -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer ^
     -sOutputFile=problematic.pdf ^
     c:/path/to/your/problematic.ps

Check stdout and stderr output to see if Ghostscript gives any warnings or errors while converting. Once you have your PDF, check which fonts are used (and if they are embedded or not).

Second Option:

1. first convert the problematic file to PCL, and
2. then print the PCL (bypassing the spooler, using netcat).

Here's a Ghostscript commandline (for Windows) that will create a PCL:

gswin32c.exe ^
     -dBATCH ^
     -dNOPAUSE ^
     -sDEVICE=ljet4d ^
     -dSAFER ^
     -r600x600 ^
     -dFIXEDMEDIA ^
     -sDEFAULTPAPERSIZE=a4 ^
     -sOutputFile=problematic.pcl ^
     c:/path/to/your/problematic.ps