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I have an old Postscript laser printer (Brother HL-1470N) which works fine with an old Linux machine that has CUPS 1.3 on it.

Printing from the browser on my new machine Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS doesn't work and seems to lock up the printer with the LED front panel flashing.

Pausing the printer within cups, and then looking at the queued file in /var/spool/cups, shows the spooled file is a PDF:

d00083-001: PDF document, version 1.5

and this happens with the printer driver configured as: Brother HL-1470N BR-Script2 (grayscale) (which is the same as the older CUPS 1.3 machine), and I've tried using the ppd from the old machine on the new one as well.

If I change the printer driver to: Generic PostScript Level 1 Printer Foomatic/Postscript1 it still generates a PDF in the spool directory!

Turning on cups debugging

D [23/Aug/2020:15:19:18 +0100] Print-Job ipp://localhost:631/printers/brmono
D [23/Aug/2020:15:19:18 +0100] [Job ???] Auto-typing file...
I [23/Aug/2020:15:19:18 +0100] [Job ???] Request file type is application/pdf.

So it feels like some config somewhere believes the printer is PDF capable, when it only wants postscript.

Any ideas where to configure this ?

bmh001
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  • CUPS converts many file types (including pdf) to Postscript. Look at the logs! `sudo journalctl -u cups`. `zless /var/log/cups/*` – waltinator Aug 23 '20 at 17:12
  • I've looked at the logs with debug turned on, and there doesn't seem to be anything about conversions shown. The files in the cups spool directory are PDFs, and I think these are the files that are sent to the printer (without any further conversion) – bmh001 Aug 24 '20 at 08:06
  • The HL-1470N is both Postscript Level 2 and PCL 6 capable, if I set up a new queue as PCL6 it works fine and CUPS does the conversions. I still don't know why CUPS sends a PDF to a printer configured as Postscript ! – bmh001 Aug 29 '20 at 11:22

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