Printer hangs with Firefox on some web sites

[lcharles]

Well this is an odd one. I upgraded to 12.04. Now, when using Firefox there are some web sites I can print from and some I can't. So for example I can't print from this forum. I can't print from BBC news. I can print from the NOAA weather site. I can print LibreOffice documents. When I try to print from the problem sites the "gs" process starts running full bore (100% of CPU). I assume gs is Ghostscript. I have an HP P2015d printer. This problem started with the upgrade.

I have no idea if this is relevant, when I look at the print job it says its being processed. The user and document are "unknown" and the printer listed is mine. I can cancel the job and it kills "gs".

[lcharles]

It looks like no one else is having this trouble or I shouldn't have put this under "Hardware". Should I just wait for a CUPS or Firefox upgrade to see if that fixes it, or get this thread moved another forum like "Help the New Guy"?

Thanks,

lcharles

[perspectoff]

Nah, I'm having the same problem with anything printed from Firefox. It prints, but it can take up to 10 minutes. It is listed as "processing" in the printer applet.

When I print something from Okular that includes graphics, I have the same problem. Printing anything that is text only is no problem. So the problem is some sort of CUPS filtering (or Ghostscript filtering) specific to graphics output. Perhaps it has something to do with the postscript to tiff filtering that intially takes place for graphics ?

I scoured the web for solutions until finally finding a solution that worked for me and my printer...

I'm using a Brother laser printer (MFC-7820N) and the default CUPS PPD files for it (BR-SCRIPT3 and Foomatic/Postscript) do not handle graphics well. The solution (for me) was to install two package with lots of tweaks pre-configured to make CUPS works correctly for my printer:

sudo apt-get install brother-lpr-drivers-laser brother-cups-wrapper-laser

Then I could install the Brother -> MFC-7820N for CUPS PPD files for the printer instead of the default ones (BR-SCRIPT3 or Foomatic/Postscript). When I did this, my printing problems were solved (including graphics).

I found (by browsing through my package manager) that there are multiple such packages for a wide variety of different printers... Apparently CUPS needs tweaking often!

The full installation details for my Brother laser printer is at:

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/MFC-7820N

[lcharles]

Thanks for the input. So far I haven't seen any tweaks for my printer. I re-installed the driver from HP's web site and it worked just the same. I re-installed the package from the repositories and got the same result. This must be a newer problem becasue the printer worked fine with the driver that came with 11.10. I've only had the problem since I upgraded to 12.04. I think that's why I don't find a lot of solutions posted on the web.

[lcharles]

I don't know exactly which update did it but as of this morning I can print fine with no change to the printer driver on my part.