“General printer failure” with Pagemaker 6.5

My wife is a middle school teacher. She teaches drama and journalism. Yeah, those go together well 😉 I help her with the school paper layout as I used to do it at the weekly college paper with Chad and Brad. Last night around midnight I finished the final layout tweaks (don’t get me started about PM 6.5 and files from Illustrator!). When attempting to print to a PostScript file for later distilling into a PDF on my other computer, I received the following error:

PageMaker Error

“An error occurred while printing.
General printer failure.
8315:5218”

After trying many different things I believe the issue is a file permission issue. My setup is like this:

  • Two computers: My WinXP, and my wife’s Win2k
  • Her computer serves as “home base” in that all files are stored there in a shared folder and I work with them over the network. She works with them locally (duh).
  • PageMaker 6.52
  • Adobe Universal PostScript Windows Driver 1.0.6, printing to “FILE:”

When you print to a file in PM, you can’t really choose where it is saved. It will always be saved next to the .P65 file you’re working with. With that said, I was trying to print to a .PS file across the network where the file was stored. PM didn’t like that. I tried sitting at my wife’s computer and printing the .PS file from the same (but now local) location. Strangely enough PM didn’t like that either. I think the permissions I have on that network share just aren’t jiving with PM. Finally, I moved the .P65 and all supporting files out of the shared folder and into a totally “normal” local file with standard permissions like C:\temp\ . That did it. My print to file worked!

Author: Joel Mama

I own a Web development company in Portland, OR called Prise Design Group (PDG for short). http://prisedesign.com/

One thought on ““General printer failure” with Pagemaker 6.5”

  1. I had the same problem with pagemaker with a different driver.

    I was printing on a postscript printer and making postscript files to send to printer for late reprint all ok.

    Until I run Acrobat distiller 7 and changed downsampling settings and distilled a file into PDF.

    It does not make any sense but I’ve read other treads about fonts and distiller.

    I tried disabling any fonts in acrobat distiller to no avail.

    So since then I could not make any postscript files anymore.

    I stumbled on this post and decided to install the Adobe PS driver.

    It fixed the problem with Pagemaker but it crashed the Acrobat distiller.

    After few reinstalls of both distiller and PS driver everything settles down.

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