[MacTUG] A sick kid and sick printers

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

I will be working from home for at least part of the day, as i have a kid with a pretty high fever. She might need to see the doc. 

I particularly wanted to come as u have woes with the new xerox printers and printing to them via a windows queue (I am thinking most print servers would give a similar response. I write about it yesterday but by including a couple of screen captures it requires moderation and you may not have seen it. I will bore you and repeat the issues here (minus screen captures) and maybe you could bounce this around at the meeting today. 

Here is the original message minus screen captures (so that message from me with the screen captures does not need to be sent)

Has anyone had trouble with the new xerox printers (e.g. 5335 and 5745) and Mountain Lion. The older OSes seem to be OK.

I think Xerox has done weird things with the drivers. Even before you click the print button, strange things are going on. When I select print from the file menu (but before I click on the print button) two "Printer Status" files appear in the print queue. 

I have never seen something like this before. They time out and crash the system, creating a rather long and nasty error message that is titled "Commandtoxbds quit unexpectedly"

At first I thought it may be the case that the 'global print' driver that is the culprit. The problem is that one has to use the global print driver if one expects to get any support for Xerox. We had some problems and until we updated our driver to the global print driver, Xerox support would not talk to us as we were not using the latest and greatest driver. But I have replicated it on printers using the non-global xerox driver targeted for the particular printer.

When I print directly to the printer — something I do not want to do — it works fine. But even in this case the two printer status print jobs are still being initiated. I think the issue is that these stupid status checks are being sent out and when it is going to a printer directly, all is well as the printer is smart enough to respond, but of course when it is going to a print server the print server does not know how to respond.

For one of the printers using the generic ps driver seems to work fine but for the other that is problematic (I think the printer is too complex to understand the vanilla postscript driver).

Any thoughts? John, as a mac user and someone involved with these printers, have you seen this???