Papercut in a purely mac environment

[ddevey]

Hi All,

 

Just wondering if anyone has any experience of papercut in a purely mac environment.

 

We have "follow me" printing with Papercut running on a mac server, but printing from a Mac just seems to be a nightmare. Sending jobs from Google Chrome fail constantly, they print, but come out half complete (with error's printed across the job) or not at all. Big jobs kill the print queue all together which then has to be restarted. Even some as small as a single pages of photos. The print server is running on a fairly beefy mac pro (trashcan) so it's not a print server spec issue and the network infrastructure is excellent.

The only workaround is to download documents from Google as PDF's, then open them in Adobe acrobat and print from there. That tends to fix most issues, but is still inconsistent. We launched Google Cloud print, which seemed to be working quite well (still inconsistent) but then google announced they were killing it from 2020 anyway.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience? What solutions do you use for managing print queues in a mac environment? Do you have a way of tracking who's printing what and how much? Which product are you using if so?

I'm not adverse to changing products, whether that's the print software or the devices, but it seems to me that Apple is making it harder and harder to manage mac's in an enterprise environment.

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[jgmitchell]

We have a mostly windows environment with about a 100 macs.

We did have the macs running Papercut like we do on our windows machines but had to remove it as it was causing us so many problems with print speed and having to have users authenticate jobs several times to make sure they were charged.

[Brimstone]

What macOS are you running?

 

https://www.papercut.com/support/resources/manuals/ng-mf/common/topics/install-mac-10-8-9.html

To test this try printing without using Papercut to check that the drivers are all working?

Edited November 28, 2019 by Brimstone

[ddevey]

Hey, thanks for the responses. We're currently running Catalina, but we had the same issues on Mojave. The issue seems to be related to the size of the documents we are trying to print. A file of around 10mb swells to over 300mb by the time it is received by papercut, which kills the print queue. Some larger files that contain photo's are hitting papercut at around 800mb. We are currently operating a 2GB file size limit on papercut, which I think is the same as CUPS but it still causes problems.

 

Direct connections to the printer via USB that bypasses papercut work fine, so I don't believe it's a driver issue. From what I understand it's something to do with CUPS on the macs.

 

I'm looking at a job now that is 1 colour page and papercut is registering it as a 212mb file.