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Hello again internets.
I've been working a bit in my free time on my family's ancestry using ancestry.com. One problem, as you can see in that last link, is that visualizing one's family tree can bee a challenge in hardcopy. And I really enjoy my Brother HL-2170W, which is a decent black-and-white laser printer that you can use over your wireless network (and the wireless stuff just works!). This interest in printing out my family tree has exacerbated a printing problem I've been living with. (and I've solved it, sort of... read on)
The problem was this: whenever I tried printing a PDF with an image in it from any Adobe product (Reader, Acrobat Pro, etc.) to my HL-2170W, the print job would fail and the error reported was:
Opening raster file failed!
Now, if you google that phrase you get a bunch of people who all seem to recommend some version of reinstalling the printer drivers (btw, I'm on Mac OS 10.5.6). I tried each of those options -- downloading from Brother website, downloading the 1.1 driver update from Apple, reinstalling the Brother printer drivers from the Leopard Install DVD -- and jack shit worked.
You might say, "Can't you print with a non-Adobe product?" and I would say, "Sure." And that's what I've been doing for the past few weeks. In fact, I'm now a Preview.app convert as it does most of what Adobe Reader does and does it in a way that I don't miss Reader (well, I do open PDFs in it to check document information and such).
However, there are some cool printing things that only tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro can do. Case in point: print tiling. "WTF?" you say? Well, Acrobat Pro has a print option that lets you "tile" a large document when you print so that you can assemble individual sheets into one large poster. Since Adobe products don't allow you to "save to PDF" from the print dialog, I can't use this feature on my HL-2170W. As danah says, "Le sigh".
So, how did I do this? (image at right)
Well, I remembered that when I installed it I told the installer not to set up a virtual PDF Printer, because macs can easily do PDFs. (right?) Why would I need another redundant way to print to a PDF? Well, because Adobe products can definitely print to a virtual PDF printer (actually Adobe Distiller) but they can't use the regular Mac "PDF" -> "Save as PDF..." print option.
How might one set up the Adobe PDF Printer? Open Acrobat Pro and navigate to the "Help" -> "Repair Acrobat Installation". One of the options is "Adobe PDF Printer" which can create the necessary "virtual" printer that will save to PDF when to print to it. This way, I can use Apple's "PDF" -> "Save as Postscript" print option to save anything to PS, resize/mess with the PS in something like Illustrator, save the PS as PDF and then open in Acrobat Pro to print a tiled version.
Hall out.
http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public/us/us/en/dlf/dlf/000000/003200/dlf003224.html?reg=us&c=us&lang=en&prod=hl2170w_all&type2=1&os=81&flang=4&dlid=dlf003224
but I was able to install the driver following those steps (over USB) and print a pdf with a picture in it from the latest version of Adobe Reader. Not sure if this will help. I saw your post while I was searching for the driver, hope you solved it.
Printer works fine directly.
Hope brother fixes this in the next driver update...
For now I'll use the MacOS Preview app workaround.
10.5.8 to Brother HL-2170W via USB; unable to
print Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional document.
I can print fine from Text Edit and Java. The way
I've been getting around it is to do a screen shot,
open in preview, then print. Super Mickey-
Mouse, for sure! When I go to the Brother
Support page as given by chosk above, I get
an error page.