Printing Elsevier E-Journals on HP 81xx Printers

[Howard Pasternack]

At Brown University we have identified three electronic journals from 
Elsevier that cause our Hewlett Packard 81xx printers to lock up in the 
"Processing Job" state -- The Journal of Affective Disorders, New 
Astronomy, and Journal of Chromatography A. The Journal of Affective 
Disorders appears to be the most problematic.  We are wondering if anyone 
else is experiencing similar problems.  Elsevier claims the problem is 
local to our site.

The problematic PDFs will print when using PCL 5e and PCL 6 print drivers 
(prefaced by 2-3 pages of garbage), they will print when the "print as 
image" option is selected (takes 5 times as long to print), and also print 
when using Postscript level 1 print drivers (also not desirable, as it is 
an almost obsolete print language and doesn't support many of the newer 
features of Postscript level 2). We've isolated the problem down to an 
incompatibility between the HP 81xx series printer and the PDFs from the 
aforementioned electronic journals. Thus far, we've updated the firmware in 
the Jet Direct cards, updated all the printer drivers to the latest and 
greatest, updated Acrobat reader to the latest version, updated both IE 
(6.0) and Netscape (4.79) to the latest version, printed directly to the 
printer via a high-density parallel cable, and tried fiddling with all of 
the setting in the aforementioned software packages. The PDFs print fine 
when sent to other HP printers in the library, even the lower end 1200n 
printers.

Any advice or thoughts or similar experiences with this.  We're reaching 
the point of considering unsubscribing from the journals because of the 
hassle involved in using Netware to free up the printers once they get 
stuck on the three journals.  -- Howard



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Howard Pasternack				
Library Systems Officer	
Brown University Library	E-mail:	Howard_Pasternack at brown.edu
Box A				Phone:  (401) 863-3346
Providence, RI 02912		Fax:    	(401) 863-9639
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