Unable to print on Epson Stylus Photo 870 inkjet 2

[coliny]

I am no newbie to Pagemaker, but I always used it on my old Quadra 650 and printed on an Apple LaserWriter Select 360. Generally with no problems (at least, since using 6.52).

I have now happily upgraded my system to a new G4 450 DP, which means no more LocalTalk printing. Not so bad, since the print quality of the Epson Stylus Photo 870 is fairly good for my purposes (color covers for one-off CDs, for instance). Except that when I try to print from PageMaker, the Epson spooler hangs when writing to disk. The spooler message window floats above the PageMaker window I'm trying to print from and will not go away, although I can access all of PM's menus and thus can Quit or Save. (I can even choose "Print" from the File menu)

I can print using the Epson from other apps. Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking that PM won't print to non-postscript printers -- is that right? Or is there some incompatabiliy between PM, Epson, OS 9.04?

Colin

 

[zefir]

PM prints to PS printers and PCL printers as well,
if the printers are installed properly.
Trials should be made always with predefined
Printer Styles, e.g. for Print to Printer, Print to File,
Print Potrait, Print Landscape and so on.
Finally a few Styles are working perfect, and the others
can be deleted. All settings are made in the PM Printer
Control Panel, not in the Windows PCP .
Still full of mysteries, but it´s always a printer problem,
not a PM problem.-----G.Hoffmann

 

[coliny]

Thanks, Zefir, for the reply.

What you say is true for the Windows version (what I use at work, and I can print to an HP inkjet or a laser printer on the network just fine) ... But I'm using a Mac at home.

G4 450 dp - 30g HD 256Mb RAM OS9.04
Epson Stylus Photo 870, latest Epson drivers
PageMaker 6.52

coliny

 

[coliny]

Here's an update:

I believe my problem may be with the file itself. I have been able to print an older (monochrome) file from PM without problems. the problem file is full color; it's possible that it contains too much info for the Epson driver/monitor app to process... I was able to print the document as an .eps file from Acrobat, however...

Unless someone has further insight, I guess I'll put this down to a mystery of PM.

CM

 

[zefir]

Perhaps it´s SIMPLY lack of harddisk space.
Color printfiles are rather large.
Some programs don´t check in advance, they
prefer to stop (or crash) when the disk is full !
----G.Hoffmann

 

[coliny]

Thanks, again! I'll keep that in mind. However, this is a new system, and I have about 28 Gb available on the boot disk

It's possible that the file is too complex for PM and the Epson drivers... Printing the file from Acrobat happened without problems. (And the printout looked very close to the image on my monitor, given that it's on plain paper and i printed in fast mode. Once again, for my purposes, that's good enough.)

Thank you for taking the time to help me out, Zefir. It is much appreciated!

CM