printer weirdness

[cellio]

New odd printer behavior: when printing from Trope Trainer run under CrossOver, if I print a document it prints the first page and then the printer's orange lights go on. I wasted a chunk of last night trying to clear a jam that was clearly not present. I confirmed that suspicion by moving the printer cable to the PC, where things printed fine. Back to the Mac, and test pages wouldn't print. Hmm.

Tonight I was able to mostly characterize it, and it's weird: after the first page prints, the printer will stay in that state until I go to some other application (I used TextEdit) and initiate a print, at which point it becomes unstuck and gives me my next page. (I do not need to actually print from TextEdit; once the printer wakes up I can cancel.) Iterate until done. I'm 99% sure I've printed from this configuration of Trope Trainer before, though there's been an HP driver update since then. No other apps seem to be adversely affected.

Now that I have a workaround I can just chalk it up to random weirdness, at least until I get annoyed enough by HP-Mac incompatibilities to go buy another printer. But my hardware seems intent on keeping me on my toes.

Comments

[cellio]

And now I need, and have, a second work-around. Sigh.

Friday afternoon I needed to print something before Shabbat, and the printer made the "starting to print" noise followed by a sort of squeak followed by the job disappearing from the queue without actually printing or turning on a malfunction light. (I heard that noise somewhere amidst the problems I originally posted about but don't remember the details.) What turned out to work was to move the printer to the PC, print something there, and then come back to the Mac, at which point I could print my one-page PDF document. I didn't have time to experiment further.

This is frustrating, but I don't know if it's frustrating enough to go get another printer...

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Maybe it's sending some sort of bogus PostScript footer that is interfering with the next job? It seems doubtful. But (assuming OSX doesn't have it hidden, which it probably does) you could try altering the level/compression of the PS it sends to the printer.