Problems printing PDF files on a label printer in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • When we try to print a PDF file, the document box width is not well handled during printing.  The box width from the PDF is not well translated in the PostScript file.
  • W are not able to successfully set the printout to landscape when printing out labels to a Zebra label printer. The labels have pre-printed company information and are filled in with various purchasing info. That purchasing info never lined up with the pre-printed portion of the labels -- we basically got
    ----------------
    | pre-printed  |
    |  i           |
    |  n           |
    |  f           |
    |  o           |
    ----------------
    

    and the info would run off the page no matter what options were selected. The printout should have looked like the following:

    ----------------
    | pre-printed  |
    |  info        |
    |  info        |
    |  info        |
    |              |
    ----------------
    

    This problem started after upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.  When Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 was first released, the problem still existed, but was not as bad as the above examples. It would print out in landscape; however, there were still problems with alignment.

  • While printing PDF labels on a Zebra printer, the labels have a specific size that gets lost during the format conversion before printing.  This problem does not happen with recent versions of ghostscript.
  • Use pdf2ps command in the environment to generate a PostScript file from a PDF file, then print the PostScript file. This works fine Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, but in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, the pdf2ps command works for portrait formats; for landscape PDFs the pdf2ps doesn't convert them properly to landscape but instead converts to a portrait format report.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 and 5.5
  • ghostscript-8.15.2-9.4.el5
  • ghostscript-8.15.2-9.11.el5

Subscriber exclusive content

A Red Hat subscription provides unlimited access to our knowledgebase, tools, and much more.

Current Customers and Partners

Log in for full access

Log In

New to Red Hat?

Learn more about Red Hat subscriptions

Using a Red Hat product through a public cloud?

How to access this content