I received some PDFs from the US Internal Revenue Service (notices with unique information for me, and yes, I trust they really came from the IRS) that crash the 2 very different HP printers I tried to print them on. I complained to HP support about it and they were no help, suggesting that it was a hardware problem with the printer. (I highly doubt it is a hardware problem given that it fails on 2 different models of HP printers from different generations. The newest printer has updated firmware that is less than 6 months old, so I believe this is a live bug in HP firmware.)
So I am looking for some way to isolate the problem in the PDF so I can report it to HP (to fix their firmware so it doesn't crash) and the IRS (to stop generating problematic PDFs that crash printers).
Notes:
- The file claims to have been generated by iText 2.1.7. So this is likely a bug or incompatibility with iText.
- I am able to use GhostScript to parse and regenerate the PDF as explained here.
- Setting
-dPDFSTOPONWARNINGon GhostScript when converting the file does not generate any warnings. - I tried using MuPDF's
mutool clean(recommended by GhostScript for fixing problematic PDFs, installed in Debian viaapt-get install mupdf-tools) but even the most aggressive settings did not fix the problem.
Looking at the differences between the converted PDFs, I now think the problem is somehow related to the use of the built-in fonts. I don't know PostScript well and so I could be mistaken for sure, but I think that the PDF is trying to use Courier and apply a "bold" conversion to it rather than use Courier-Bold. This is based mostly on the observation that the crashing PDF does not include any fonts and only refers to Courier and Courier-Oblique, while the GhostScript output (which prints fine) includes the font glyphs in Courier, Courier-Oblique, and Courier-Bold and doesn't use the built-in fonts.
If this is a known, documented issue, I still have not found a reference to it on the web, but if anyone can provide one, please do, as that will help me escalate this with HP and the IRS.
