Brother HL-1210W; 1200HQ mode

[onnokort]

Hi,

I own a brother HL-1210W printer. The printer prints the test page in cups correctly when installed. However, it silently fails for me for more complex documents. The printer LED will blink and then stop with the printer seemingly returning a succesful status, as all such jobs are presented as successful in the CUPS system.

However, I noticed that I can tweak your driver to get it to print complex documents. The following change seems to do the trick:

diff --git a/src/block.h b/src/block.h
index 13daea1..e5dbd8d 100644
--- a/src/block.h
+++ b/src/block.h
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ class block {
 
  private:
   static const unsigned max_block_size_ = 16350;
-  static const unsigned max_lines_per_block_ = 128;
+  static const unsigned max_lines_per_block_ = 64;
 
   std::vector<std::vector<uint8_t>> lines_;
   int line_bytes_;

The 64 seems to be a sharp limit; with any higher value it doesn't work. Tested with generating a 4958x7008 1-bit image in gimp, filling it with 50% random black pixels, saving as .ps (default options) and then using gstoraster followed by rastertobrlaser. Also tested with a simple printed web page from firefox that resulted in a raster file of the same dimensions from gstoraster.

Hope this helps and thanks for writing the driver.

[pdewacht]

Thanks! That was a mysterious issue that was reported with many Brother HL-series printers. I'll check with a couple of other reporters and make a new release soon.

[onnokort]

You're welcome. To add some further info: 600dpi seems to work fine on my printer now, but out of curiousity I tried printing once at 1200dpi and it failed for a normal (so moderately complex) document. I suspect that the value might need to be even lower (half?) for that. As I am not really interested in that resolution / mode I didn't do any further investigation but can do that if you want - just drop me a note.

Are the values that are currently in the driver basically reverse-engineering guesses or is there some kind of further reasoning behind them?

[pdewacht]

It's mostly guesswork, based on my old DCP-7030. It seems to work well on DCP-series printers, but the HL-series seems to behave just a little different.

[warheat1990]

@pdewacht: hello, any ETA on when is this changes going to be pushed in printer-driver-brlaser package? Thanks

[onnokort]

Sorry to bother everyone again, but I think it is fair to notice here that I again had trouble printing a document using my HL-1210W with default settings (600dpi). This time I tried to print a RGB JPEG scan of 300dpi (A4) that I converted to PDF using imagemagick's convert tool. The JPEG had a resolution of 2464x3500 pixels.

Lowering the value of max_lines_per_block_ from 64 further down to 32 did the trick for me. I haven't tested whether this might impact other prints, so YMMV. I do not have enough insight into the workings of the transmission scheme to the printer to know whether setting even just a value of 1 here would cause the printer to fail processing on other occasions; but if that is not the case, I suggest changing it to a really safe value like that as I think it is better to have a slowly printing printer than one that silently drops pages depending on their complexity.

[mickeyreg]

DCP-1512E here :) Similar problem noticed - 1200HQ mode did not print anything. I've set max_lines_per_block_ = 16, then recompiled and reinstalled driver and 1200HQ works fine :) Thanks for a hint :)

[iloveitaly]

I had this issue on my printer HL-L2340D. This commit fixed the issue for me.