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I received some PDFs from the US Internal Revenue Service (notices with unique information for me, and yes, I trust they really came from the IRS) that crash the 2 very different HP printers I tried to print them on. I complained to HP support about it and they were no help, suggesting that it was a hardware problem with the printer. (I highly doubt it is a hardware problem given that it fails on 2 different models of HP printers from different generations. The newest printer has updated firmware that is less than 6 months old, so I believe this is a live bug in HP firmware.)

So I am looking for some way to isolate the problem in the PDF so I can report it to HP (to fix their firmware so it doesn't crash) and the IRS (to stop generating problematic PDFs that crash printers).

Notes:

  1. The file claims to have been generated by iText 2.1.7. So this is likely a bug or incompatibility with iText.
  2. I am able to use GhostScript to parse and regenerate the PDF as explained here.
  3. Setting -dPDFSTOPONWARNING on GhostScript when converting the file does not generate any warnings.
  4. I tried using MuPDF's mutool clean (recommended by GhostScript for fixing problematic PDFs, installed in Debian via apt-get install mupdf-tools) but even the most aggressive settings did not fix the problem.

Looking at the differences between the converted PDFs, I now think the problem is somehow related to the use of the built-in fonts. I don't know PostScript well and so I could be mistaken for sure, but I think that the PDF is trying to use Courier and apply a "bold" conversion to it rather than use Courier-Bold. This is based mostly on the observation that the crashing PDF does not include any fonts and only refers to Courier and Courier-Oblique, while the GhostScript output (which prints fine) includes the font glyphs in Courier, Courier-Oblique, and Courier-Bold and doesn't use the built-in fonts.

If this is a known, documented issue, I still have not found a reference to it on the web, but if anyone can provide one, please do, as that will help me escalate this with HP and the IRS.

Old Pro
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  • Litmus test, what is the form number, but it's very unlikely its "malware interested in the IRS server". If is we wouldn't be able to help you determine if that is the case since we are not the IRS. – Ramhound Mar 18 '22 at 20:09
  • If the problem is with iText report it to them. I had a HP firmware bug where printing a certain web page caused the printer to crash. I file a report, and did a live chat and initially got no useful help. Magically 6 months later a new firmware is released that fixes the problem and the problem is specifically listed in the changelog. – cybernard Mar 19 '22 at 01:08
  • @cybernard iText 2.1.7 is over 10 years old (released in 2009) and not supported. It is used, I believe, because it is the latest version with a sufficiently permissive license to be used for free commercially. I want to give HP what it needs to fix the problem and the IRS sufficient reason to fix the PDF generation. – Old Pro Mar 19 '22 at 01:32

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