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Mac LPR/LPD and Other non-Apple Printing Issues

Updated July 5, 2005

Reader Reports

TIP: Fix for "garbage printing" from LPR/LPD or IP.

June 29, 2005
Yvan Rodrigues sent us a link to an article he wrote about a problem with Macs printing to non-AppleTalk printers.

I have put a lot of work into this problem. I support about a dozen Apple clients in a heterogeneous environment with a Windows 2000 server. I have written an article on the problem and have several solutions, including a print processor that I have written that installs on the server and transparently converts the binary to ASCII.

He describes the problem in his article:

When printing from a Macintosh to a printer using any AppleTalk method such as LPR/LPD, IPP, Rendezvous, USB, etc., certain files will result in many "garbage" pages being printed, each one usually having a line or several lines of random characters.

Rodrigues saw a description of the problem in our old archived pages, Windows NT Unsolved Mysteries. The problem report was called LPR (TCP/IP) Printing problem from Mac OS through an NT Queue, and dates from December of 1998. My how time flies...

TIP: Postscript printing via LPR/LPD

July 1, 2005
Santino Rizzo

Yvan left out one of the easier solutions when printing binary postscript over LPR/LPD. You can specify the printer's binary postscript LPD queue when you add the printer. For example, HP printers use the queue name BINPS for binary Postscript.

TIP: HP docs say printers are the cause

July 5, 2005
Brian Scarborough also had problems with LPR printing from Macs. He didn't find the same answers mentioned above. Instead, he found fixes at Hewlett Packard's web site, including and article called Mac OS: Garbage Text at the Top of Multiple Pages.

I read the reports of pages of 1 line gibberish printing via LPR with binary postscript data. We've had the same problem in OS X 10.3.7 from Quark. However, the problem isn't with the protocol, or the binary data. Rather, it's with our HP printers. Basically, we were printing to the wrong queue name. If the printer gets the binary data on the wrong queue name, it doesn't know what it is or what to do with it. So setting up the queue with a binps name, as per this HP document, should work.

(In all honesty, I haven't been able to get our network guys to try this on our Windows print queues yet, but I bet it'll work.)

Yes, the problem is with the binary postscript data. For those printers that don't have a binps queue, I guess the solution is to print with asci data.

Here's an HP page which shows the workaround to go from binary to ascii. I suppose this is necessary for those HP printers that don't support a binps queue.

And there's some more info here.

As far as my $0.02 on this issue, when we are printing to a printer with true PostScript Level 3 via LPR (such as our Xerox 7300 or Canon Colorpass z5100) we never have problems with this issue. Nowadays it's very rare to find an HP printer that supports true Level 2 or 3 PostScript anymore, as they use their own PS emulation. So I suppose they don't make printers that automatically understand binary data for this same reason.