After Update to Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra - Printer M553dn undefinedresult xshow message

[Tullimonstrum]

Preaching to the choir.  Just offering workarounds when I find something that works.  I work in IT at a university and we support thousands of users.  I don't think this is sufficient, but if it can help some people, then good.

I have not personally seen this issue except on High Sierra machines with Office 2016 installed and trying to print to HP devices.  That said, I've seen the issue occur while trying to print Office documents, PDFs, web pages through a browser, even Apple apps like Keynote.

You are the first person I've found while searching this issue to report it happening with images.  You sure they didn't have some kind of text header?  Were they printed from a browser?  Doesn't seem consistent with all the posts I've read.  I don't think PDFs being printed as image would necessarily cut out all font rendering.

I do think it is just a font issue, some kind of failed interaction between the embedded fonts and rendering them to print.  PostScript fonts have 2 parts: screen version and print version.  We don't see this problem on 10.13 machines with Office 2016 that used to have Office 2011, we think because  Office 2011 actually installed fonts instead of using embedded fonts, which still exist on the system. 

[rekt57]

One of the repeatable scenarios is a word doc with Calibri as the font and an image in the middle of the page. Doing "select all" and changing the font to something different, allowed us to print the document successfully. Removing the image from the same original document and printing the document (still with Calibri) also allowed us to print the document.

Another repeatable scenario comes from saving this same document as a PDF in High Sierra. This newly created PDF will yield the printed error regardless of the MacOS that prints the file (and only to HP printers). Saving this same file as a PDF in an earlier MacOS version and printing that PDF from High Sierra works just fine. Just. Freakin. Weird. And. Annoying.

[maurpra]

In our network all of the Macs had Office 2011 installed prior to Office 2016 and we do have the problem.

The problem comes erratically when printing plain text emails and not necessarily with Office docs.

I've tried editing the mail giving the problem and changing its font, and the problem is still there.

If I print the same email from the same Mac to our HP Pagewide MFP printer it DOES print with no issues.

If I print the same email from the same Mac onto a HP M605 I get the offending command error.

If I use the Airprint driver the printer M605 spools but it does print nothing (not even the blank page is produced).

Definitely it is not a font issue but a specific Postscript Driver (Vers. 19.13) issue which comes with High Sierra on SPECIFIC HP printers (not all of them).

So far the only way to print on M605 is to use the generic PCL printer driver.

[Tullimonstrum]

Did you try the workaround I posted?

[bdepaav]

Tullimonstrum - I tried it and ran a test in Word and it worked. No luck with Excel. thanks for the suggestion.

[maurpra]

Tullimonstrum, as I wrote in previous posts, all of our Macs did had Office 2011 installed before upgrading to Office2016 and HighSierra, and looking into the /Library/Fonts system directory I can still see all of the Microsoft fonts files copied there and present.

No matter of this we still have the problem.

Pending the fact I can print the same text/email over our HP Pagewide Managed MFP printe with no errors, meanwhile I do get the error on the HP Enterprise M605 printer, I don' believe is related to Macs fonts presence or not.

Most likely it is a problem of the specific HP Postscript driver (ver 19.13) when used on some of their (HP) printers, not all of them indeed.

[Tullimonstrum]

Then how come the error shows up even if you use Generic PostScript drivers instead of HP's?

[Bill_C_WISD]

Using the Generic PostScript drivers as a workaround is working here. Using OS 10.13.2 and Office 2016. The print quality is of course degraded, but usable. End user is printing off emails for retention and is not getting the error.

I set up a second printer profile, using the the orignal HP Printer but replaced the HP M553 driver option with the Generic PostScript drivers and named it "Email Printer". The user has the option of selecting either the original HP Printer or the "Email Printer" to print docs until this issue is resolved.

[Tullimonstrum]

Do you mean Generic PCL?  We've used this as a work-around when all they need is black/white/duplex, but it messes with quality very severely.

Generic PostScript has not worked at all for us to get around this PostScript error.

[maurpra]

I agree with you but how come if I print the same email text from the same Mac on the HP MFP it does print, if I print it on M605 it gives error?

As you have seen for another user, using the Generic it does work, it doesn't here but we are talking about different HP printer models......

I believe this goes beyond our knowledge..