zlacker

I have a Brother printer, which supports plugging in a USB stick with a PDF to print the PDF.

Its PDF parser doesn't seem to support all PDFs, and for some PDFs it will PRINT, on paper, an error message from the PDF parser.

So not only did it not print a perfectly valid PDF, it also wasted paper and ink for it.

You can't know beforehand which PDFs it'll support or not from looking at them, any computer / phone PDF viewer supports those. It could be as simple as a PDF sent by an airline.

They should:

1) use a proper PDF library, not some half baked one

2) if something is wrong with the PDF, show the error on screen, not waste paper for it

>>Aardwo+(OP)
This feels like the workflow for a 3dprinter without Octoprint. I get the feature is there, but why on earth would you use it?

>>Aardwo+(OP)
i've had a lot of Japanese made printers stumble on PDFs for some reason.

My Brother and Epson have both have trouble with printing old out-of-print machine manuals that used ancient PDF versions. They'd happily accept the job, and then proceed to crash the print spooler and more-or-less break explorer on more than one machine with the same set of drivers.

The problem would go away if I converted the pdf to a newer version or into an entirely different format.

>>Aardwo+(OP)
Heh, I would have preferred that to one of my recent experiences with an HP printer. It would simply silently drop the job only for that specific pdf (an ordinary shipping label of which I had printed many on that machine before). I dug around so many menus trying to figure out where my job was going until I by chance clicked print on a different document. At least with the paper error message I would have known right away to apply the hack of screenshot + print png.