Subject: Netatalk+ghostscript+macos8.5 unhappy

From: "John R. Dunning" <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 Jul 2000 13:18:18 -0000

Hi netatalk wizards, I'm hoping somebody can shed some light on a
wierd problem I've been having.

I have a mixed network of macs, pcs etc.  I run a linux server, which
among other things has a public printer.  The printer is an epson
stylus 640 driven by ghostscript 5.50.  

The problem is that when printing from a powerbook g3, macos8.5.1, I
get all kids of postscript errors and garbage printed out, instead of
my output.  I have a couple of older macs, running system 7.5, which
are able to print with no problems.  

I've tried directing the output to a file and then using ghostscript
manually to display the file, in an attempt to see where in the
postscript we're running off into the weeds, but when I do that it
works perfectly, gs is able to display the output.  I've tried
examining the generated postscript to see if there was anything
obvious, but the postscript generated by the older macs and the new
one vary in a large number of ways, so it's hard to know what that's
telling me.  I tried installing the latest adobe postscript printer
driver on the offending mac, but that had no effect, I still get the
errors.

I don't really believe this is an atalk problem, rather I think it's
some wierdness in the way my mac printer driver is configured, or
something wrong with the way my ghostscript is configured.  But I
figured this group might be likely to have seen something like this,
and be able to offer suggestions on how to get this unscrewed.

Thanks in advance...

In case it rings a bell, the error text looks like this.  I've elided
out some of the stuff, because it's fairly voluminous.

Error: /invalidfont in -dict-
Operand stack:
   Helvetica   -- dict:13/25(L)--   Font   Helvetica  --dict:13/25(L)--   Helvetica
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--  --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   1   3   %oparray_pop ...
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:908/941(G)--  --dict:0/20(G)--  --dict:59/200(L)--  --dict:235/309(L)-- ...
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
Current file positioin is 136273