tlug: Look, ma, no fonts!

[Matt Gushee <matt@example.com>]

Jonathan Byrne writes:

 > Following the LyX tutorial, I created my first test document and a)
 > Viewed it in Xdvi and b) Printed it from the LyX menu, as specified in
 > the tutorial.  Imagine my surprise when what came out of the printer was
 > blank paper.  I then tried printing it from Xdvi and got the same
 > result.  The printer is a postscript printer.
 > 
 > Where should I look to find out what's causing this?

Ugh. I've had things like this happen before, whether for the same
reason or not I'm not sure. Unfortunately, TeX printing involves so
many little interacting programs that it might take a while to find
out. But here are some things that would be helpful to know:

1. Does the printer usually work? (I presume it does, otherwise you'd
have mentioned that).

2. Does printing from Xdvi usually work? Or printing DVIs by other means?

3. What fonts are you using? Are they TeX fonts or Type 1 fonts, or
something else (if you're not sure, I might recognize the names)?

4. Do you get any error messages? Maybe if you try printing from the
command line and post a sample of the output, I or someone else might
get an idea of what's happening?

5. Is ghostscript involved in the printing process in any way
(e.g. font generation)? 

6. Have you gotten dvips, as per Steve's suggestion, or are you still
using dvi2ps? If you have dvips, the dvips manual (dvips.dvi or
dvipsk.dvi, probably) has some good info on printing problems,
including a section called "If you get no output at all."

Offhand I'd guess it's probably a dvips/dvi2ps config problem, but
it's really hard to tell without more info.

Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido
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