Having three minor problems printing from Quark 4 to a HP ColorJet 8550 on the Mac OS9. I’ve tried all three websites and not having much luck finding the solution(s), and am hoping someone here can suggest a solution or direct me to a good website.
It prints fine. But:
Whenever I start up the Mac and go to print from Quark, it comes up with a message something like ‘can’t open printer’; then I have to go and re-set the HP as default printer, or choose it in the Chooser, even though it was already chosen and set to default printer the day before.
Every time I print from Quark, two icons get put on the desktop – ‘create adobe pdf’ and ‘virtual printer’. These don’t go away and I have to delete them.
The printer is a duplex printer (prints double-sided perfectly from PC) but when I try to tick the box “print on both sides” under Printer - Layout, it’s greyed out.
Other info – the printer comes up twice in the Chooser, once under AdobePS, and once under Laserwriter8. I’ve tried printing from both – the AdobePS has more options (eg it at least has the “print on both sides” there, if greyed out, but the Laserwriter8 version doesn’t have it there at all).
It seems that you are missing the appropriate printer description file. It goes in the extensions folder sub folder printer descriptions. (not 100% on the name of the sub folder, I left OS 9 about a year ago, and funnily enough over a decade of using the old OS is fading into a distant, albeit sometimes fond memory much faster than I thought it would).
The Printer description should be in the folder with the printer extensions installer or available as a part of the driver package for download at the HP website.
If it’s JUST from Quark that you have this problem, not any other apps (it kinda sounds like that, but I’m not sure) meethinks the offending element is a Quark XTension (not to be confused with system extensions). The Quark XTensions are little plug ins you can add to Quark to add functionality to the program. They can be found in a subfolder of the Quark Folder in a folder aptly named “XTensions”. There are several XTensions that create a shortcut for writing pdfs (create the PS file, open distiller, distill, then quit distiller) It sounds like yours may be slightly different than the one I use, but I’ll take a shot at troubleshooting.
In Quark, go up to Edit, then down to preferences, and a little drop down menu pops up. Is there something in that popdown menu that has pdf in it’s name? If there is, open it and define the printer there. If you don’t see anything there, you’ll have to go with trial and error. Quit Quark and grab half of the XTensions and drag them to the “XTensions Disabled” folder. Launch Quark, if it gives you the error message again, you know that the offending XTension is still in the XTensions folder, if not, you know the offending XTension is one of them that you just dragged to the XTensions disabled folder. Repeat the process by moving the extensions around until you have it narrowed down to the offending XTension.
I’ll check back to see if this was the problem. It’s a slow work day. (The Ad biz isn’t doin so hot in this economy)
Sparc was dead-on about the pdd (printer description file) that will fix your duplexing problem. First you might try double clicking on the printer icon and then go under the “printing menu” to “change setup”. You can view pdd files there, you also can add options that Auto Setup may have failed to recognize as installed on your printer (i.e. duplexer)
You don’t really have 2 printers in the chooser, you have 2 drivers. That is normal. Since it sounds like you are using postscript type applications, the Adobe driver is probably the one I would reccomend.
HP printers can be persnickety about drivers. If you haven’t already, download HP’s own driver, install it, select the HP printer in the Chooser, and select the right PPD. HP’s driver download page is here.
I’m reaching way back here, but you’ve got the desktop printing enabled in OS 9, yes? If so, when you set up the printer, you should see an icon for the printer appear on the desktop. The files that are appearing on your desktop sound like vestiges of the desktop printer creation process gone awry. When you install the HP software, a proper printer icon should appear. From the icon, you can control various aspects of printing, the way you used to with the old PrintMonitor application.
Oops, forgot to say I had no luck with playing with XTensions. It does seem to be a problem with the PPD, might download it again or look for an update or something.
You can always trash your printing prefs, there could be something buggy there.
As far as the virtual printer thing, adobe acrobat does that (you obviously have the full version, not just the reader) open distiller and set the printer preferences up there as well.
Still no luck. Thanks for persevering, NurseCarmen, but I think these problems are too minor to spend much more time worrying about them! I’ll see if my local HP rep gets back to me.