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Hwy

Member

Registered: 2011-05-29

Posts: 1

Re: [BROTHER printer] printing problem (SOLVED)

I wanted to thank all of you especially stopstop and jdbrody for helping me track this down. I am having the same problem on a Gentoo system. Since several people still seem to lack a solution, and a fixed version of file probably won't be forthcoming anytime soon, I'll share my solution.

The problem file is having detecting postscript is caused by 1 byte on the end of the print file: 0x04. Looking up this ASCII control code tells me that this is an “end of transmission” code. The other character jdbrody mentioned is actually a line feed (harmless enough). I tried stripping this code out and it actually works fine without it. But since the “end of transmission” code probably SHOULD be in there my solution is to create a separate tmp file with the code stripped just for file to check.

I am assuming all the filter files for various models are fairly similar. My printer is a HL-5340D, so alter accordingly.

Make a backup of /usr/local/Brother/lpd/filterHL5340D before editing.

My edited filter file lines 32 – 41 look like:

INPUT_TEMP=`mktemp /tmp/br_input.XXXXXX`
INPUT_TEMP0=`mktemp /tmp/br_input.XXXXXX`
INPUT_TEMP1=`mktemp /tmp/br_input.XXXXXX`

cat > $INPUT_TEMP1
LENGTH=`wc -c $INPUT_TEMP1 | cut -d' ' -f1`
let LENGTH-=1
head -c $LENGTH $INPUT_TEMP1 > $INPUT_TEMP0

FILE_TYPE=`file $INPUT_TEMP0 | sed -e 's/^.*:[ ]*//' -e 's/[ ].*//'`

My changes are as follows:

# make a new extra tmp file I call INPUT_TEMP0
INPUT_TEMP0=`mktemp /tmp/br_input.XXXXXX`

# get the length of INPUT_TEMP1 in bytes and subtract 1
LENGTH=`wc -c $INPUT_TEMP1 | cut -d' ' -f1`
let LENGTH-=1

# copy INPUT_TEMP1 to INPUT_TEMP0 minus that pesky EOT code
head -c $LENGTH $INPUT_TEMP1 > $INPUT_TEMP0

# change this line so it checks INPUT_TEMP0 instead of INPUT_TEMP1
FILE_TYPE=`file $INPUT_TEMP0 | sed -e 's/^.*:[ ]*//' -e 's/[ ].*//'`

Also around line 249 almost at the end of the script where the other 2  tmp files get deleted, remove your extra tmp file also.

rm -f $INPUT_TEMP0

Thanks again
I hope this helps someone.

Last edited by Hwy (2011-05-29 06:58:05)

Lausanne

Member

Registered: 2011-06-14

Posts: 1

Re: [BROTHER printer] printing problem (SOLVED)

Yes, it helped!!! Many thanks to Hwy for his solution and to everybody that helped in solving this problem!

Although my Brother filter complained about the missing 'a2ps' command, I didn't need to install this package. Now, it doesn't complain any more about the missing command. I guess that the filter wanted to use 'a2ps' because the 'file' command did not work?

srdtf

Member

Registered: 2012-01-10

Posts: 1

Re: [BROTHER printer] printing problem (SOLVED)

The solution in the post by Hwy dated 2011-05-29 01:52:42 worked for me as well. Thanks!