Disaster!!

Questions on certain printers and applications
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drbob
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 19, 2009 12:15 am

Disaster!!

Post by drbob »

I really wanted to like this program and was planing to buy the key. Good quality prints, useful controls over ink usage and rendering. Above all long prints on my Epson Stylus Pro 3800. Then the first shadow, I could not induce landscape printing (see my post in this forum, Sept 18.) Well, I could always rotate the image in PhotoShop. I did so and made some nice prints. Then disaster! Went to make a print, same settings as the previous one. Got the dreaded "%%BoundingBox error message received" and the job would not print. Deleted the job, reset all the print parameters is PS and PF. Same error message, same failure. So I closed everything (including PhotoShop). PF toolbox could find the printer and show ink, etc. Relaunched PS and it Froze without showing the print dialog - Well and truly froze! I had to force quit! I then tried to remove the PrintFab Printer. But now the System Preferences froze when attempting to open "Printers and Faxes". Forced quit, rebooted and this was repeated several times. Also couldn't access jobs of printers on the CUPS "server". Tried to used the Uninstall on the PF disc image. Another freeze. So now I have a Mac Pro which cannot print - not a pretty thing for a photographer with a show coming up! So now I'm trying to restore from Time Machine. I've been a heavy computer user since 1987 and involved with digital imaging shortly there after. I've had some buggy software, but nothing as nasty as this. I'd appreciate learning where the hidden code for PF resides so that I can remove it by hand (If I can get my system to work).
Here is the system information. Mac Pro quad core (late '09). OS X 10.5.6, Epson Stylus Pro 3800, PhotoShop CS 4 11.01.

Bob Hesse
Perhaps my antennae should have been alerted when I noticed several unresolved threads in this forum without further replies from zedonet.
zedonet
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Posts: 2156
Joined: Fri Oct 06, 2006 8:02 am

Post by zedonet »

Dear drbob,

thank you for your feedback!

Such behaviour has never been reported before - PrintFab should not affect operation of your software in any way.

No bit of printer driver code is executed before you open the actual print dialog (when printing from Photoshop: when you hit the "Print..." button from the Photoshop print with preview dialog). Printer drivers do not contain any "kernel mode" code, so they cannot affect system stability.

Installing PrintFab and the strange behaviour of your system must be a pure coincidence.

To uninstall PrintFab, start the PrintFab Installer and choose "uninstall".

PrintFab's executable code is stored in the following places:

/usr/bin/pfprint
/usr/bin/pfsetup
/library/printers/ppd plugins/printfabpde.plugin
/usr/share/printfab
drbob
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 19, 2009 12:15 am

Post by drbob »

Thank you. To be clear there was no kernel panic or total system freeze. PhotoShop froze when I tried to open the print dialog (after the PrintFab "bounding box" crashes) After that the system was OK except that the print and faxes dialog, the PrintFab toolbox, and the PrintFab uninstaller hung up and could not be opened (Forced Quit worked). The printer and jobs tabs on the CUPS page could not be opened. Mutiple reboots didn't help. A rather amazing coincidence that printing related processes and nothing else should hang up after the PrintFab crash. Anyway I went back and restored the system to a point before the PrintFab crash. I was then able to open print and faxes and remove the PrintFab printer. I could also open the PF toolbox and the CUPS tabs.
I shall give PrintFab another try on my MacBook Pro (after setting a restore point). I'd still appreciate information on what is a "%%bounding box error" and why you feel I could not print in landscape mode.
drbob
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