Printing problems in 10.5 Leopard

In our company we've been using Mac Mini's with 10.4 Tiger and printing has never been a problem. However when we purchased a new machine preloaded with 10.5 Leopard we've been having a lot of troubles printing. Google searches has produced a lot of hits regarding similar problems without any solutions.

All except one are network printers. One key problem with our HP LaserJet 2300n is that tray selection is ignored and always wants to print from tray 2.

Printing to our HP DeskJet 6940 seems to only print a few pages then stops. Spooler seems to send all pages but only a few or one are printed. This problem also plagues the USB connected DeskJet 960c.

I've tried updating drivers, using the Guteprint (sp?) drivers, and resetting printing without avail. Please tell me that there's something that can help me fix this. This particular machine does a lot of printing and I'm pulling my hair out having to print one page at a time on the HP DJ 6940 & 960 and walking half-way across the building for the LJ 2300 (good exercise at least).

Thank you,

Ryan

Is there any reason you're using the Gutenprint drivers instead of getting the latest driver directly from HP?

It was a last ditch effort to try anything. I'm back to using the lastest available drivers. The 2300 does not have any drivers posted on the HP website so I'm stuck with using the included Leopard drivers. I did download drivers for the 6940 with didn't change. Gutenprint didn't include support for the 6940 yet but did work with the 960. I've since uninstalled the Gutenprint drivers.

RyanThaDude said:

It was a last ditch effort to try anything. I'm back to using the lastest available drivers. The 2300 does not have any drivers posted on the HP website so I'm stuck with using the included Leopard drivers. I did download drivers for the 6940 with didn't change. Gutenprint didn't include support for the 6940 yet but did work with the 960. I've since uninstalled the Gutenprint drivers.

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It looks like that's an older printer. Chances are HP stopped developing drivers since there were already some in the open source community.

Typically the Gutenprint drivers are pretty decent. Did you try updating the Gutenprint package?

Yes, even trying the beta's. I'm beginning to think that this is more of an OS issue rather than driver.

RyanThaDude said:

Yes, even trying the beta's. I'm beginning to think that this is more of an OS issue rather than driver.

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I would definitely back off of the beta versions and go with 5.0.2, which is the latest stable release. Then, I would continue troubleshooting in the printer driver settings (there's a ton of them). But start from a stable platform first.

Keep in mind that Gutenprint/CUPS *is* the foundation of OS X's print system, even if you're using proprietary drivers. In that way, there hasn't been a lot of change from Tiger to Leopard (at least from a background services standpoint). My guess is that the driver is just a little different and needs some tweaking, but it's hard to say without any first hand knowledge of these printers.

Unfortunately the same problems with the stable drivers. Out of curiosity I took one of our Tiger machines and used the stable Gimp/Gutenprint drivers without any problems. I can assume that the drivers are not the issue but something else within Leopard causing the problem.

RyanThaDude said:

Unfortunately the same problems with the stable drivers. Out of curiosity I took one of our Tiger machines and used the stable Gimp/Gutenprint drivers without any problems. I can assume that the drivers are not the issue but something else within Leopard causing the problem.

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Did you go back through the printer settings on both machines to see if they matched up precisely?

cwa107 said:

Did you go back through the printer settings on both machines to see if they matched up precisely?

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Other than the slight differences between the two OSs the printers are using the same settings and are connected the same way.

RyanThaDude said:

Other than the slight differences between the two OSs the printers are using the same settings and are connected the same way.

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What I meant by that is that the drivers have a ton of settings that can be tweaked:



You can change the field where it says "Paper Handling" to see the rest of the available settings. I would recommend comparing your Tiger machine with the Leopard machine to see if there are any differences.

Does that make sense?

Yes I understand. Unfortunately even matching these settings from Tiger to Leopard make no difference. This is where I'm trying to force which tray to print from on the 2300 which works in Tiger but not Leopard no matter if I try the proprietary or Gutenprint drivers. Also on the Tiger machine I can print multiple pages without any problems.

I have managed to get most of the problems fixed with the laserjet printers by starting with a fresh OS install. I'm still having issues with my USB connected DeskJet 960. Also seems most of my problems are printing PDF files in both Preview and Acrobat. Printing multiple page documents usually will only print the last page and stop. Single page documents usually die at page end without ejecting (printer gives error). I've set debug to ON in the CUPS config but too much data to understand what going on.

The more I'm reading on these and other places I've pretty much come to the conclusion that HP printers are not Mac and especially Leopard friendly.

I agree with that, HP have been terrible with Leopard drivers, even ones they have posted do not work properly and not for old printers either. I have a current model 2840 and they do not have fully working drivers for this despite many forum and direct pleas from frustrated HP customers!

HP-2300 Leopard compatability

I have just spoken to the kindly folks at HP and they inform me that the 2300 drivers are only compatible with Mac OS up to 10.4. In particular, 10.5 is not supported.

If you look at their downloads web page you will see that the most recent set of drivers was released in 2003. HP tell me that they will be updating the drivers to support 10.5 but they have no idea when this will happen because the printer is such an old model. Put more simply: you are screwed until we get round to it but can't tell you when that will be.

Actually my problem is a bit different from what you guys had. I can print from Omnigraffle, Safari and Preview to my 2300dn. However, when I try to print from MS-Office, Eudora, Filemaker or Textedit the application quits the moment I hit the print button in the print dialog box. Lovely! And I thought it was me. Indeed, I went through the following before getting round to calling HP:
– Reinstallation of OSX 10.5
– Fixing all permissions on my hard disk
– Reinstalling the HP printer drivers
– Reinstalling MS-Office

Of course what makes me really mad is that as part of the 10.5 re-installation I wiped all my data. you know how it is you are a bit cross and trying to get others things done because the bloody printer won't behave and you don't concentrate sufficiently on the installation dialog boxes... Not disastrous because I was backed up. The back was 6 days ago and I've only lost a bit of data but even so...grrrgnnnhhhhh!!!!

I waited for more than a year to upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5 to avoid most of these terrors – clearly I did not wait long enough. I do have an Epson 1290 which seems to work fine under 10.5 but the 2300dn is (has been?) my main workhorse.

The result: A huge black mark for HP, and I think I'm going to send them to the naughty step for quite a while. Actually, I'm pretty mad about it all because 10.5 was released in October nearly 22 months ago and the 2300 series was part of the core printer range.

I thought the problem was Apple!

simonhulse said:

I have just spoken to the kindly folks at HP and they inform me that the 2300 drivers are only compatible with Mac OS up to 10.4. In particular, 10.5 is not supported.

If you look at their downloads web page you will see that the most recent set of drivers was released in 2003. HP tell me that they will be updating the drivers to support 10.5 but they have no idea when this will happen because the printer is such an old model. Put more simply: you are screwed until we get round to it but can't tell you when that will be.

Click to expand...

Simon, THANK YOU for posting this! My company has 4 of these 2300s that have been acting strange since we upgraded to 10.5.7, and I thought the problem was with Apple, but it appears that might not be the case.

Well, those printers are old enough that we were thinking about replacing them anyway, so that may be the answer for us. But I certainly share your anger over HP's attitude about this issue. I suppose they can't support everything forever, but it's still aggravating. (And costly.)

HP2300Dn with Leopard 10.5

Great News! I have just tried the Gutenprint drivers – and they work just fine. Please see the following web address:

Gutenprint for Mac OS X

There seem to be different downloads. I chose "gutenprint-5.2.4.dmg" because it looked as if it might be the most recent version. I suggest reading bits of the document "How to print with Gutenprint.pdf" that comes with the download (it's inside the "Documentation" folder).

When you install the Gutenprint drivers they seem to install alongside your existing drivers. You clearly need to use the "Print & Fax" preference pane (part of System Preferences) to set up the new driver. I found it useful/necessary to do the following:

1. Before I set up the 2300 with the new driver I removed all previous 2300 set-ups from the left hand side so I could start again, and not get confused.

2. I clicked on "Add Printer" then on the "IP" icon at the top of the dialog box (see pages 8 & 9 of the How to Print with Gutenprint referred to above).

3. You will need to select "Internet Printing Protocol – IPP" in the top pull down menu. You will also need to fill in the IP address of your printer. For me this is 19.168.1.10. "Queue" and "Location" seem to be names you can make up for yourself.

4. So far so good. Now the absolutely KEY thing. You have to use the "Print Using" pull down menu at the bottom of the dialog box to select "Select a Driver to Use" (don't just let your computer choose "HP LaserJet 2300"). You have to scroll all the way down to "HP LaserJet 2300 – CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.4" – choose this one! You will see it sitting right after "HP LaserJet 2300" which is the one you do NOT want (because it only works for OSX up to 10.4). If you let your computer choose the non-Gutenprint driver you will be using the driver you already have – and this is the one that does not work with 10.5.

Hope this works for you guys at HLCTech, and for anyone else having the same problems I had. I was nearly in the mood to buy another printer but I really don't need to do this because the 2300 works just fine with all the other macs on my network still running 10.4.

HP 2300Dn with Leopard 10.5

Great News! I have just tried the Gutenprint drivers – and they work just fine. Please see the following web address:

Gutenprint for Mac OS X

There seem to be different downloads. I chose "gutenprint-5.2.4.dmg" because it looked as if it might be the most recent version. I suggest reading bits of the document "How to print with Gutenprint.pdf" that comes with the download (it's inside the "Documentation" folder).

When you install the Gutenprint drivers they seem to install alongside your existing drivers. You clearly need to use the "Print & Fax" preference pane (part of System Preferences) to set up the new driver. I found it useful/necessary to do the following:

1. Before I set up the 2300 with the new driver I removed all previous 2300 set-ups from the left hand side so I could start again, and not get confused.

2. I clicked on "Add Printer" then on the "IP" icon at the top of the dialog box (see pages 8 & 9 of the How to Print with Gutenprint referred to above).

3. You will need to select "Internet Printing Protocol – IPP" in the top pull down menu. You will also need to fill in the IP address of your printer. For me this is 19.168.1.10. "Queue" and "Location" seem to be names you can make up for yourself.

4. So far so good. Now the absolutely KEY thing. You have to use the "Print Using" pull down menu at the bottom of the dialog box to select "Select a Driver to Use" (don't just let your computer choose "HP LaserJet 2300"). You have to scroll all the way down to "HP LaserJet 2300 – CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.4" – choose this one! You will see it sitting right after "HP LaserJet 2300" which is the one you do NOT want (because it only works for OSX up to 10.4). If you let your computer choose the non-Gutenprint driver you will be using the driver you already have – and this is the one that does not work with 10.5.

Hope this works for you guys at HLCTech, and for anyone else having the same problems I had. I was nearly in the mood to buy another printer but I really don't need to do this because the 2300 works just fine with all the other macs on my network still running 10.4.