No, not really.

Maybe the segfault came because I tried to run the programs manually
(with mimiking this silly ARGV[0] calling method), but without the
required environment variables. It was the hp usb driver which died
after reading the models.dat, but maybe this was caused by me. The fact
that these programs can segfault by being called without proper
environment is a sign of poor quality.

Debugging ubuntu-cups is a nightmare, since it is not obvious what is
going on and not trivial to fetch the outputs of the several stages. I'm
having these printing problems since around 9.04, each time hoping that
the next release would fix it.

There should be a way to have a copy of the in and output of each stage
for debugging, and there should be a documentation of what happens at
all. It is not obvious what happens with the print job after submission.

My current guess is that somewhere in the processing of the postscript
stuff something goes wrong, because I am under the impression (but not
sure) that the problems occur more often when printing pdf files (from
xpdf or evince), which means that the problem depends on the contents of
the file.

Even when the printer prints, in these cases top and bottom are cropped
often. I therefore tend to process everything manually from the command
line into the final postscript and use lpr -l


I've seen that ubuntu-cups print processing generates a postscript and runs it 
through a filthy shell script (cpdftocps) with heaps of sed scripts and other 
programs. This is probably a bad idea. Too many things can go wrong when 
processing postscript with sed scripts. About fifteen years ago I ran into a 
similar problem where I tried to process postscript with such methods. It 
sometimes worked, sometimes not. I found that some of the sed/awk/... scripts 
were triggering on usual postscript commans, which accedently occured in 
char-encoded pictures as well. It's definitely a very bad idea to process 
Postscript with things like sed. That should be abandoned. 


I'd propose to throw that shell script away and write a single program in ruby 
or whatever that first properly parses the postscribt, dissects into header and 
pages, and then performs well defined operations. 

Unfortunately I am quite busy at the moment and can't afford to spent
hours and days into debugging print system with which's internals i am
not familiar with.

If it at least was possible to simulate all steps cups performs from the
command line easier, that would help.

-- 
print system hangs when printing 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/581444
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