When printing with thinlocal, images get a black background. In some cases, I get almost completely black A4 pages.
Client: 4.16.0 on Linux Server: 4.16.0
The image shows a picture of a direct-print (from the system the client is running on) next to a thinlocal-print of the same test-page.
Hi @k97,
Thanks for the report. I don’t have a straight answer for you I’m afraid, printers are tempremental things… this is nothing I’ve seen before. We would have to try and reproduce it so we can troubleshoot. What distribution were you using both client and server side? I assume you were printing from the same application in both cases?
@samuel any ideas?
This is not something I’ve seen before. Would it be possible for you to share this document with us so that we can investigate what’s happening @k97?
What operating system do you use on the client machine?
Thanks for your replies.
On server side it’s the current Tuxedo-OS (KDE).
On client side the problem appears with Ubuntu+KDE (Kubuntu 22.04) and Tuxedo (with KDE).
No problem with the windows tlclient.
The printed document is the printer-test-page from the setup-dialog. Same problem with other documents with embedded images.
I attached another picture that shows the print via window-client (left) and via kubuntu (right).
Hi @k97,
I don’t have access to the KDE printer test page, but I can see that the gradient in the header isn’t working either. So I did a quick test using the “Print Black & White” page at https://printtester.com, which contains a gradient.
Printing both locally and via thinlocal worked fine. Would you be able to perform the same test and see if it works for you?
ThinLinc basically hands the print job over to whichever printer is configured as “default” on your local machine. Could you also check that this is configured correctly?
This looks familiar and is something I’ve seen sometimes when the print data is converted to PostScript. ThinLinc does this on Linux for maximum compatibility. I’m not sure whether that is really needed for current systems, though, and we have a bugzilla entry to use the modern PDF format instead:
https://bugzilla.cendio.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5347
Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any way to work around the issue with the current client.
No issues with the printtester gradients.
It also seems to depend on the applications from which printing is done. I printed the same document three times (reduced to 16 pages on one to save color). In the photo, you can see all three prints:
It’s exactly the same with xubuntu instead of tuxedo on server-side.
I can share the document, but I’m not allowed to upload pdf-docs.
Thanks for the info @k97.
As @CendioOssman pointed out, we do have a known issue in our bugzilla which may be causing this. I was also reading the other day that CUPS are removing driver support completely in favour of “IPP Everywhere”:
Apparently IPP Everywhere means that everything gets converted to PDF and sent straight to the printer. So it may not worth spending much time fixing the “old” CUPS behaviour, but rather upgrade ThinLinc to make use of the new “driverless” CUPS once it is released.
In the mean time, a workaround may be to print to PDF, save the file to a “shared drive” from the client, and print locally using an application which is known to give the right output. Not ideal, but hopefully it’s only a minority of documents which don’t print properly in ThinLinc. Hope that helps.
