Printing gibberish...

[Nikhil Nair <nnair@pobox.com>]

Hi,

Would really appreciate some help, here.  I'm having trouble getting a 
printer working, and this really ought to be a snap, as no 
filtering/translation of any sort is needed.  Parallel port; system: etch, 
amd64, 2.6 kernel (with udev), debootstrap installed.

The printer in question is a parallel port based Braille embosser.  I'm 
trying to send a test file which is already in Braille, so all that's 
needed is for it to be sent to the printer with no interference, and 
nothing added.  Instead, it's being garbled somehow: the text, originally 
just five lines worth, is being split into four separate pages, despite 
the fact that there was nothing remotely like a formfeed in the file. 
The embosser worked fine on my previous machine, under very old Debian 
software.

I'm using lpr, and initially had problems because the lp module wasn't 
loaded; I fixed that temporarily (I thought) by 'modprobe lp', but I 
suspect I shouldn't have had to do that, which probably means I'm missing 
a package which should ideally have been brought in by dependencies.  (My 
system is uptodate with etch.)  BTW, parport and parport_pc were loaded.

I'd very much appreciate any help, as this is getting a bit frustrating. 
Oh, BTW, I tried turning off the printer and looking at the file under 
/var/spool/lpd/lp; it was fine at that point, no garbling evident.

Cheers,

Nikhil.