Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

A friend asked us to fix his mother's Epson printer.  It would not 
self-test using common combinations of buttons.  There are three buttons - 
red green and yellow, none labelled except with some cryptic symbols.

It is a Windows printer so we could not use print screen.

I found the 'basic' (smaller version) user manual at Epson and downloaded 
it.  2.5M pdf file.

pdftotext said it could not handle it  so I installed xpdf.
pdf2ps would not handle it - it is encrypted.  Nor would xpdf.

I have had this problem before.  DOS ghostscript won't do encrypted files 
unless you download another piece somewhere, which I never did because 
pdf2ps for DOS will convert it to ps and I can view ps with psview.

It is a 2.5M file and I did not feel like splitting it to 2 floppies so I 
brought the DOS pdf2ps to this computer.  It produced an 8M ps file from 
the pdf file that I fetched to DOS with ltools (lcd /tmp, lread filename  
filename - the second being the DOS file name and path).  Converted and 
got an 8M ps file.

Went into linux and since I have nothing to read ps files with, used 
ps2pdf to convert it back.  Got a readable pdf file which is 27M (!).
Looked at it briefly with xpdf and could only read the larger text.  Tried 
xsvga and xvesa.  Pictures were there.  Something about a movie.
And many lines of small grey dots which I surmise are small text.
I don't feel like printing out 64 pages of this junk to find instructions 
on the self-test.  I could split the file and take it to a DOS computer 
with psview via floppy disk.

DOS gs/psview is so far much handier than linux gs/xpdf - faster and it 
will display 256 colors if you have Trident or Tseng cards, and it can 
decode encrypted files.  


So I ran pdftotext on it and got an 8M txt file that is full of blank 
pages and ^T ^F scattered around the screen.

How do linux users normally handle encrypted pdf files?  Xpdf is 
excruciatingly slow and there was no table of contents, just a bunch of 
pictures of how to see the instructions as a movie in Windows.  

Does Abiword read ps files faster than xpdf reads pdf files?  

I have asked the friend to read through the pdf file and let us  know how 
to do a self-test. He thinks it is holding down one button while pushing 
another one.  We could try all six possible combinations, I suppose.
In the meantime we gave him a working HP 540.  Epson C60 or S60?