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I'm having a strange problem with one of my two Ubuntu 12.10 installs. One system works perfectly for creating PDFs with Texmaker and printing the PDFs from Document Viewer to networked printers. The other system will not print PDFs made with Texmaker to either a USB-connected laser printer (Brother 4070CDW) or a networked printer (HP4000 series) whether they are generated on the misbehaving system or generated elsewhere. PDFs generated from non-TeX/LaTeX applications (e.g., LibreOffice) print fine.

The Brother 4070CDW printer supports printing directly from a Flash drive, and the PDFs print fine via that method.

What happens when printing a 1-page PDF directly from Ubuntu 12.10's Document Viewer varies with the printer used. When printed to the Brother 4070CDW, there is a page with some wingding-type glyphs on one line, interspersed with a few of the characters that should actually be there. Then the printer prints another page with the following on it:

ERROR:
invalidfont
OFFENDING COMMAND:
Type1BuildGlyph
STACK:
686
0
0
0
0
0
0
444
444
0
0
0
0
0
-mark-
-mark-
-mark-

Printing the same 1-page PDF to the networked HP4000 series Postscript printer produces a first page that is completely blank, and the errors listed on the second sheet are different:

ERROR:
invalidaccess
OFFENDING COMMAND:
filter
STACK:
/SubFileDecode
endstream
0
--nostringval--
--nostringval--
25
false

To me it seems as if there is a problem with the TeX fonts. I originally experienced this problem with the 64bit version of Ubuntu 12.10. Since this Athlon 64 system only has 2 GB of memory (its maximum) I decided it probably made no sense to run the 64bit version after all. So my first attempt at fixing the problem was installing the 32bit version of Ubuntu 12.10, formatting the hard drive in the process. With the 32bit version behaving the same as the 64bit version did, I went on to try doing:

fmtutil-sys --all

without affecting the problem.

(I have also tried deleting the printer and setting up a new one in the Printer application.)

At this stage, I am about ready to give up and just keep a small flash drive next to this computer so I can print PDFs made with Texmaker. (I rarely do color in my LaTeX documents so my main reason for wanting to print to my local color laser printer is just the convenience of not having to walk 30 meters to pick up my output.)

Any suggestions for resolving this issue would be very much appreciated!

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1  
Do you have the same packages installed on both computers ? You chan check that using dpkg -l | awk '{print $2}' > package_list.txt and check the differences with the package lists on both systems. The meld software can help you on that. – Vincent Nivoliers Oct 29 '12 at 23:28

closed as too localized by Martin Schröder, Thorsten, zeroth, Andrew Swann, Kurt Oct 30 '12 at 12:47

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