Printing Stopped Working

Running 12.1 on x86_64 machine with KDE desktop and two printers installed on lan, HP LaserJet 5M and HP ColorLaserjet 2840 both of which can print test pages from yast installer.
For reasons I cannot fathom however I cannot print a plain text file either from Kwrite of Libreoffice. Never had this problem before. I suspect there are some logs somewhere which might give a clue. Could somebody please give me a prompt as to where to look or what might be problem?
Budgie2

There should be some useful info in ‘/var/log/cups/error_log’. You can also increase the verbosity by editing ‘/etc/cups/cupsd.conf’. Find the section “loglevel” change “info” to “debug”, save and exit, then restart cups with ‘rccups restart’. The try a print job, and note what is reported in error_log.

A potentially useful source of help:

Troubleshooting | HPLIP Knowledge Base

Hi and thanks. I shall do as you say but meanwhile found the following in the CUPS error log:-

printer-state-message="/usr/lib/cups/filter/pstoraster failed" 

.

Will start googling but this suggests something is wrong.
Regards,
Budgie2

On 2012-06-06 23:56, Budgie2 wrote:

> Hi and thanks. I shall do as you say but meanwhile found the following
> in the CUPS error log:-
> Code:
> --------------------
> printer-state-message="/usr/lib/cups/filter/pstoraster failed"
> --------------------

Try printing the sample CUPS page from the cups local page (localhost:631).


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)

It might also be worth considering the following potential cause of this symptom:

Portal Printing - openSUSE

which involves defining the ‘RIPCache’ value in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, which can otherwise impact on printing in some situations when not explicitly set to something useful.

Various printout failures with CUPS default “RIPCache 8m”
By default CUPS has only 8 MB RIPCache, see “RIPCache” at cupsd.conf - Documentation - CUPS
This default exits since a long time and did not cause any issue. But since some time more and more weird issues regarding printout failures happen which are related to this low default. The root cause is that recent versions of Ghostscript changed the internal banding API but the CUPS raster driver was not updated accordingly in Ghostscript.
For example there might be no printout at all because “/usr/lib/cups/filter/pstoraster failed” or there is broken printout like in the attachment 380232 in the Novell/openSUSE Bugzilla.
If printout failures actually depend on the low default 'RIPCache; value, it helps to add in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf a line like

RIPCache 128m

and restart the cupsd afterwards. Then the CUPS raster driver in Ghostscript gets more memory available so that rendering is done in full page mode and not in banding mode which avoids issues because of the changed banding API.
In some cases (probably only for color printing at high resolution with the Gutenprint driver) you may have to specify much more, e.g. 1GB with

RIPCache 1024m

of course provided you have at least 2GB main memory in your computer.