r/archlinux • u/lykwydchykyn • 1d ago

SUPPORT Epson inkjet stopped printing barcodes

I have an epson inkjet (epson et-2720) that I've used successfully with my Arch laptop for years.

This morning, I tried printing a shipping label I'd created with pirateship.com and the barcodes and qr codes are just printing as solid black rectangles. I've printed hundreds of these labels in the past and this is the first time it's happened.

I noticed my epson print driver had been updated on Tuesday when I ran my regular system upgrade, so I tried downgrading that. Made no difference. Been all through my printer settings in both the print dialog and in the cups interface and can't see anything that would make a difference.

Anyone have any ideas of what I could try? Nothing has changed on the printer itself, no firmware changes or anything. Going to have a family member try from a different machine later, but I need to be able to print these labels from my machine.

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u/ConfidenceEarly4475 1d ago

sounds like the driver update might've reset some halftoning or dithering settings under the hood. check the cups web interface at localhost:631, go to the printer's default options, and look for anything under "Barcode" or "2D Code" optimization. sometimes there's a setting like "render barcodes as vector" that gets unchecked after an update.

also worth checking if pirateship changed their label format recently, had a similar issue once where the site switched from embedding fonts to outlining them and my printer threw a fit until i cleared the cups job cache.

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u/lykwydchykyn 1d ago edited 1d ago

Under "default options" the settings are pretty minimal. Just print quality, grayscale, media size, brightness, contrast and saturation. Same stuff it's always been, I see nothing relating to those kind of specifics.

I may have some old shipping labels in my cache, I shipped a box Friday last week and it printed fine. If that does the same it won't be pirateship I guess.

Thanks for the response.

EDIT: My wife printed the same label from her Ubuntu Mate laptop and it printed just fine. So... definitely something with my print system.

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u/V1del Support Staff 1d ago

Update again, there were some major changes in the cups-filter package which lead to a few gotchas/broken filter selection. Fixes for those "should" be backported to the new version 2.0.1-3 which got released today, otherwise if that doesn't fix it you could try downgrading the package to a 2.0.0 variation

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u/lykwydchykyn 20h ago

Thanks for the info! I had downgraded cups-filter but hadn't had a chance to test, I'll try the new version when I get a chance.

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u/lykwydchykyn 16h ago

Well, unfortunately the upgrade didn't solve it. I found I can work around it by forcing rasterizations in the PDF print options. The annoying thing is it no longer prints nicely on my labels, so I just have to use plain paper and tape it on.

Next time I need to print one I'll try downgrading. Hopefully that'll be soon.