PostScript files print as PostScript code

Tue, 12/22/2020 - 15:24 By Dave Brooks

Q: I send PostScript files and they print as PostScript code.

A: There are likely two possibilities here.

The first possibility is that you are using the text print action to send a PostScript job to your printer. The text print action will send any textual data to a Windows printer, and that's usually a good thing.

However, in this case, that works against you. PostScript data is plain text data (usually), so RPM doesn't have a problem sending it, but that's not what your printer needs. It needs the actual PostScript print job without that layer of interpretation.

In this case, be sure to use a Raw Print action instead of a Text Print action to pass the original PostScript to the printer.

The second possibility is less likely, but it does happen. If you have a PostScript print job, then someone upstream has a process that turns your original data to be printed into PostScript. We sometimes run into a situation where the PostScript job goes through a second "text to PostScript" process. 

Here is how you can determine if this is the problem for you:

  1. find a computer in your network with Ghostscript installed
  2. go to a command prompt and type ps2ascii --help to get the command line options to run this utility
  3. run the command as specified, using your print job data as the input file
  4. look at the output file; if you know what PostScript looks like, or if it starts with something along these lines:

    %!PS-Adobe-3.0

    You are probably dealing with this double translation. Usually, when you run ps2ascii, you will get plain text extracted from your PostScript job. 

In the second case, when we share this result with the user, they instantly know where the extra translation is happening and can fix it easily. Please note this usually happens before the job is sent to RPM, so it's not something we can necessarily "fix" for you unless you've configured RPM to do this somehow.