Raspberry Pi Journal #3

Printer Trouble

I was printing my other blogspot for archival purposes, when I realized that I was double printing the month of June. I quickly cancel the print process, except it already got sent to the server, and I couldn't open up the web page quick enough for me to cancel the print. So, I did what I know would work: Turn off the printer.

Sure enough, when the printer administration web page came up, it said unable to send job to the printer. So far, so good. Obviously, I cancelled all print jobs so far.

The trouble was, I couldn't send any new print job to the printer! After trying various attempt over 10 minutes, I gave up and rebooted the computer and printer. This should have worked. Except, it didn't!

More going around to check the printer. It's not until I stumbled upon "Resume Printer" option in the Maintenance menu that I am able to print again. Apparently, there is a status recording somewhere that cause the printer to be invalid until "resumed", whatever that means.

I think this is bad behaviour.I should be able to reset the printer by turning it off. Smart devices are way too smart these days. It's no longer just a simple turn off, turn on for resetting their values. What if something got screwed up inside? You'll have to take it to the service department. What a hassle!

Libre Office trouble

I was doing multiple windows on Libre Calc, when I found out that the new window I spawned was affecting the old window as well. Of course, this happens after I'm done all editing with the new window. There goes my work out the window! To be honest, this is the first time I've seen it happen. I wonder what the purpose is to link multiple windows to a file?

In the end, I simply toss out all changes. Reload the old file, and save under different name. Close all windows, and load all files. Problem solved, but more time wasted. Growing pains, I suppose.

Raspberry Pi Journal #2

Raspberry Pi Journal #2
Libre Office Printing Trouble

I was using Libre Office Calc, the spreadsheet, to print out my schedule for the day. It works fine, but when I printed it, it's a bit too small. I decided to zoom it up a little and use landscape format. The landscape format is fine, but there's no zoom control. Worse, when I printed it, the top got cut off.

Obviously, I need the whole thing on page, and aligned properly. In the end, I use lp command again, and manually adjusted the margins. I also adjusted the scaling and landscape mode.

So, the steps that works would be
1. Print to PDF in portrait
2. Use lp to print the PDF with appropriate settings.

In my case, the settings was scaling=150 page-top=-450

At least I can adjust the margin to negative values without error.

One more thing: I found out what SpliX is. It's Samsung printer driver for Linux. I tried to print from Midori web browser, and that is the error I got. Don't know how to solve it.

TheMagPi #8 has bad PDF format?

So, I was printing out TheMagPi magazine pdf files because, silly me, I didn't get the Kickstarter printed magazine offer. I can tell you that those books printed out thick! I bound three of them with staples. Interestingly, the Raspberry Pi went 100% CPU mode for quite a long time. Apparently, the codec or whatever is a complicated version. There was a time where I forgot to connect the printer, and it printed the pages one after another with no waiting, so I know it's not the printer. The bottleneck lies with RasPi!

The interesting about it is that on PDF#8 wouldn't print. Not even one page! I checked out the printer status on 127.0.0.1:631 and it said: "SpliX Cannot open job"

Huh? What exactly is SpliX? I know lp uses GhostScript, but SpliX? And only on number 8. The rest of the PDF printed out just fine. In the end, I had to use my Windows machine to print out TheMagPi #8. So, the problem isn't solved.

By the way, I'm using the command line lp because xpdf went into Segmentation fault every time it tried to print. Very disappointing. It took me a while to note that the printer defaults to A4 size, instead of US Letter size like I wanted. In the end, I scaled the page to 96% of the original size to good result.

lp -o scaling=96 filename