[Originally posted February 18, 2005 on my old blog, MrBarrett.com]

For many years, I argued against abandoning support for the AppleTalk protocol on networks because of the problems presented by printing postscript data over IP (instead of AppleTalk). Mostly, I was right; printing postscript data over AppleTalk is easier and more troublefree. However, even Apple doesn’t fully support AppleTalk anymore. The world has moved to IP, and you should move along with it. But moving your network printing from AppleTalk to IP can be a headache.

How many times have you printed a document with postscript data in it and gotten many pages of several lines of gibberish code instead of your document? Yup, me too. It rarely happened when you were printing your postcript documents to your HP printers over AppleTalk. Now it happens quite a lot. The technical reason for this is that most of the print drivers from HP don’t fully support printing postscript data via IP. All of the design programs I know (Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator) default to sending their postscript data in binary format. HP’s printer drivers don’t understand this and will not parse the data correctly, resulting in reams of wasted paper (unless you catch it in time and cancel the job). The good news is that there’s a solution. The bad news is that the setting you’ll need to change is in a different place for each program.

In each case, we’re going to change the program to send your postscript data in ASCII format instead of binary format. HP’s printer drivers are better able to understand the data and I’ve had very few printing errors on my network since doing this.

Quark XPress 6.x
Quark is the odd duck when it comes to print dialogue boxes. Most Quark users are familiar with this and know their way around.
1) With your document open, go to Print and the dialogue box pops up. Along the top are six tabs for setting different print setttings.
2) Click on second tab called Setup and make sure you’ve selected the correct printer description file for your printer. Having the wrong file or a generic B&W PPD can cause problems as well. Also make sure you have the desired paper size selected.
3) Click on the Options tab and you’ll see a popup menu next to Data. Here is where you can tell the program to send postscript data as ASCII instead of Binary.

Unfortunately, this is a per file setting. If you click the Capture Settings button, it’ll save it for that file, but you do need to do this for each file.

Adobe Photoshop CS
1) With your file open, go to the Print with Preview dialogue box. Note that the only way to change this setting is through the Print with Preview box. The standard Print dialogue box does not contain this option. In the Print with Preview dialogue box you’ll see an option for switching between Color Management and Output. Switch to Output.

2) Now you’ll see an option for switching your postscript data between Binary and ASCII formats. Make sure ASCII or ASCII85 is selected.

Adobe Illustrator CS
1) With your file open, go to the Print dialogue box. Make sure the correct printer description file is selected and paper, orientation etc. Now click on the Graphics option from the list on the left in the dialogue box. This will open the settings for your graphics. Under the Data Format option, you’ll see a popup selector for changing between Binary and ASCII formats. Select ASCII. If it’s greyed out, you do not have any postscript data in your document.

Adobe has made this easier for us to manage than Quark. Once you’ve set it to ASCII for one file, it should stick for subsequent files (possibly, unless created by older versions of AI, PS, etc.). With Quark the default is almost always binary and you have to do it for every single file!

To be fair, this problem is mostly with HP’s printers not fully being able to interpret (interpolate?) postscript data as it’s sent over the IP network. I’ve never seen the reams of gibberish errors when printing to Xerox, Canon, or other manufacturer’s models. I remember reading somewhere a technical explanation for why HP’s drivers do this, but have long lost the link. In the meantime, here’s what we do to save ourselves headache, grief, and reams of paper. I hope it works for you too.

[Update: Some of these settings exist in previous versions of these software packages but I don't have them installed on my computer to get screenshots. Quark is in the same place but Adobe moved some things around between the last version and the current one. The important idea is knowing to make the change, not necessary where it's located in the software.]

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