OO prints only blank pages (Mac)

[ephany]

*Yes, I searched the forum*

I have never been able to print directly from OpenOffice. I have been using it for 1.5 years, first on PPC Powerbook, then Macbook Pro running Tiger and now Macbook Pro running Leopard 10.5.2. When I print, my printer shows up in the dialog, makes noises exactly as if it's printing and then spits out an entirely blank sheet of paper. The only way I have been able to print is to export to PDF.

I have found only a couple of references to similar problems and the only solves I found usually involved downloading NeoOffice. I like OO, and would just like to be able to print directly from it without going through a bunch of extra steps.

Thanks in advance for any help on this issue.

ephany

P.S. Screen shots of printer settings attached.

[kabing]

I'm sorry that no one has answered your question. I'm afraid I don't know the solution. It might help someone else to know what printer you are using.

kabing

[lgusaas]

The Aqua native port now uses the Mac printing dialogue. OO.o 3Beta is now available.
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/downl ... Intel.html

[wurzel]

*Yes, I searched the forum*

P.S. Screen shots of printer settings attached.

From the screen shots, I see you are using a Canon printer. I hate to say this, but Canon is notoriously *crap* at providing good support for anything Unix-like, including the Mac. We have similar issues at work with networked photocopier/printers by Canon, despite the VAR telling me that Mac OSX and Linux was fully supported. This is simply untrue. Canon often provides a PPD file that you can use, but it is not optimised for printing from X11 applications like OOo.

It used to be possible to set up a particular print queue and driver (pointing to the PPD file) from within OOo on Mac using the spadmin utility, but since the dev team switched to using CUPS directly from within OOo, this no longer seems to work, or make any difference. And yes, it is a real PITA.

The *only* solution I have found so far is to use NeoOffice. Even the Aqua beta (I'm actually using the latest development version m12) of OOo still can not handle printing to network printers properly, without screwing up.

Alex

PS. I like using OOo and I like the Aqua version even better, but I have a business to run, and am not going to waste my time making things complicated for myself or my staff. It just needs to work, if it doesn't I'll use something that does - NeoOffice does that for me.

[ephany]

Hi,

Thanks for the thorough answer on this. I suspected that there wasn't a good solution. I'll just keep doing what I've been doing, which is converting to PDF before printing. We just bought a new Epson printer so maybe that will work better. (But we're using up all the Canon ink before we get rid of it).

Thanks again,

ephany