Pluma can't print black color

Support & Help Requests
#1

Hello all,
I’m a long time Linux user (10+ yrs) , even if I don’t know all the in-and-outs, I’m no programmer (yet), but I got to hang around until now thanks to the community and help I always find in the forums.
It’s the first time I’m actually opening a thread on something, but it seems like I can’t find anyone else on the internet who’s having my same problem, so let’s get to the point.

I recently bought a Canon Pixma TS3150 printer, succeded to connect it to both Windows and Linux, wifi working and all, everything works fine, great.

The problem comes out when I’m using Pluma text editor and I try to print, it prints everything but black text. Colors are fine, the printer simply seems not to get the black part: when I try to print, the page come out with all the colored text, and the black ink cartridge simply does nothing at all. It’s like it’s not even rendering the black text, ignoring it.

This happend only with Pluma editor, test pages print well, and I even installed Gedit to print what I write with Pluma and it comes out well, as expected. So why is Pluma behaving like this?

For now I’m working it around this way: writing on Pluma editor, then copy-paste into Gedit and get it to print, but I really don’t like Gedit as I don’t like the way Ubuntu is implementing Gnome 3 DE right now (that’s the main reason why we all are using MATE right now isn’t it?) so I would like to dump it in favor to be using only Pluma editor which I really really like (and use it a lot).

I’m running Ubuntu MATE 18.04 64bit on an ASUS K550J laptop.

Thanks in advance to anyone who will answer

#2

Is the black font displayed when you select print preview?

Mickey :slight_smile:

#3

Yes the preview displays out correctly, I’ve also checked all the configurations and everything looks fine, I send the print through Gedit with the same settings and text and it goes. I’ve even tried to change the color settings since I’m using a dark theme and I had white letters displayed but of course that didn’t work.

#4

I just learned something. Pluma actually prints the color highlighted mode I see all the time editing scripts. It seems to default to Scripts -> sh.

I tested this and the small amount of black text is fine here. Does setting highlight mode to "Plain Text" (makes it ALL black) print a blank page?

Here is 18.04's /bin/which script:

image.png546×551 49 KB

So "-ef" and "print -r" (I think they're black) and "ALLMATCHES=1" looks like it's printed with white ink?

#5

Yes, the issue came when I was trying to print some code I written in Java so I was using Java colors and all the black parts were missing, I would only see special Java commands and nothing in between.

Yes, when I print in “Plain Text”, then it just prints out a blank page. Hey, I’ve never seen anything print out so quickly lol

#6

Pluma still isn’t printing black text.

As i said, this only happens with Pluma text editor, any other text editor is fine. Colors are printed

#7

There’s some algorithms under the hood in some color printers to use 3-color-black instead of the black cartridge. I can’t help but think this may be involved either physically, like black is bad but other apps cover it up, or a bug in such an algorithm Pluma triggers.

I tried this on 18.04 and an HP printer with no issues. Anyone else?

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