We’ve been hit with a department having printing issues from Sierra starting since last week. Previously where the user could print to “local printer” the job now never reaches the printer. It just started happening for our Xerox copier and Zebra label printer. This hasn’t been an issue for years.
Has anyone else had recent printing issues? Maybe a Windows update? We are running Sierra 6.2. TY
Gerald, we’ve been having problems with printing anything that uses a print template to our local receipt printers since last Thursday. It seems to be an issue randomly for different workstations and logins. We get a garbled printout of nonsense characters…sometimes reams of it and then often the job stays stuck in the print queue so that nothing else goes through. We’ve been able to restore printing on some workstations after a lot of trial and error but the problem seems to crop up again in a couple of hours or the next day and is continuing to affect new workstations and logins that were previously working. We’ve been troubleshooting and working with support but getting nowhere. If anyone has a solution, we’d love to know!
Support says it is a problem with Jasper Soft. I did a search in the forum for Jasper Soft but I didn’t find much help. Are people using Jasper Soft or the default print templates (the ones that III supports)?
I’ve taken to editing the .jrxml files manually whenever possible due to Jaspersoft being so finicky. If you have an older, working .jrxml file to base your updates on, this is what I would try first.
I have an enhancement in the Idea Exchange to essentially just do whatever is necessary to allow Sierra to support an even vaguely current version of Jaspersoft. Please consider throwing it some support.
Hi Sarah,
We’ve chatted already so I’m just reporting that we have the same issue here with multiple computers & local Star Micro TSP100 receipt printers. It seemed to start around the time of a late October Windows update (10/27ish). We’ve tried rolling back KB5044029, KB4011048, KB5030841, and KB5043064 as well as a few more recent ones but are still having the issue.
I don’t know what that means, modifying the .jrxml files. Can you elaborate? Where are they located? The issue seems to be that the print job sometimes does not make it to the printer; i.e. nothing happens. Tech support is asking for detailed steps and configurations on the workstations. They also ask to document what happens when trying to use the default print templates and to print to PDF instead of the printer.
Following our Innovative tech’s suggestion, we’re able to print to PDF using the JasperSoft template which indicates that it is not a 3rd party print template issue.
To test this, go to File, Select Printer, Print Templates and select the printer type and print method to PDF. The user needs to have the permission “Update Print Templates tab (283)” to select PDF.
HI Gerald. I’m going to take a leap here and guess that you are unfamiliar with these files because you are working on a Windows system configured to suppress/hide filename extensions. Otherwise I can’t imagine how you would not have encountered *.jrxml files before now, especially since you’ve been wrestling with print templates.
When you export a print template from the SDA (specifying a destination folder in the process), the output is that template’s *.jrxml file along with any bundled image files such as a library or institutional logo and/or promotional graphics one might place at the footer of a checkout receipt (Due Slip in Sierra parlance).
Under ideal circumstances I could continue to use Jaspersoft Studio to open the *.jrxml file and make my modifications that way, but since newer editions of Jaspersoft Studio seem to produce *.jrxml files which cannot be reliably processed by Sierra’s printing subsystem, that is why I have taken to editing the files manually using a good text editor. I use UltraEdit but Notepad++ or similar would work as well.
The *.jrxml file is an XML file which completely describes the print template; the source of data fields and their placement (X-Y coordinates) on the template, font properties, names and placement of image files, scaling… the whole damned thing is in there. There are a lot of GUIDs employed as element IDs and being long hexadecimal strings, those can make it a little challenging to read, but as a text file the *.jrxml file is human-readable and -editable with some patient practice. Make several backups along the way while editing, one at each step so you can regress as needed.
Let me know if I can help with a specific print template. I can’t diagnose the problem(s) with a broken one, but I can usually update a functioning print template.
One question, @grezes: Of those print template(s) which won’t print, can you successfully preview it/them in the SDA?
Thanks @bgaydos. I must have made the .jrxml files at some point but, we’ve been lucky and haven’t had any print issues up until two months ago. So now it’s a relearning experience to visit print templates. I don’t even know if the exported files exist in our local environment.
We are able to print to PDF using the print template so, it doesn’t appear to be a print template issue. It seems to be an intermediate issue sending the print job to the printer which Innovative has already intimated is a local issue out of their hands. Unless we can show that it is happening repeatedly with other customers.
Thanks for sharing your details. It sounds like the timing for your library aligns fairly closely with Jeremy’s first report of this. We didn’t experience this until November 28th (more in line with the timing that Gerald is reporting) but it has been an ongoing issue for us since then. Dispite trying many different things to resolve the issue, we’ve still not found a reliable solution and most of our locations are down one or two working receipt printers.
We couldn’t identify a Windows update that aligned with the start of the issue but we did try rolling back on one workstation and it didn’t resolve the issue for us.
Hi Everyone,
We have a meeting set up for this afternoon with support. If any of you are able to post an update to the thread today with details of your printer problems and troubleshooting steps to date, I’d love to be able to bring that to the meeting as proof that this is not an “us” issue.
Thanks,
Sarah
Thus far we’ve still only experienced this with sort of behavior with 2 maybe 3 printers across the network. In one of those instances the problem in the end came down to the printer setting in Sierra having been changed from graphic to text in a login. The other case remains a bit nebulous unfortunately due to spotty communication with the library around troubleshooting this issue, though so far attempts to roll back or replace drivers seem to have been unsuccessful.
As I said, I was able to print to PDF using the print templates. Our problems began around the last weeks of November. We haven’t tried replacing the printer drivers. We looked at Windows updates and one of our test computers with the issue has not had an update for a while. We updated to Sierra 6.3 and that didn’t change anything. Larry from Innovative support a posted this update which we still need to follow up.
The print to pdf example provided shows that Sierra is printing and using jasper soft template to a local printer call pdf printer. This just tells Innovative that Sierra is doing its part. Now it gets tricky because the rest for the communication is a windows driver and network issue. I would do the same pdf test first but figure out how to use an Innovative default template to print printer to pdf and then try print to printer. There are 2 modes that are helpful for printing test.
All of these steps can be used to test defaults vs jaspersoft, Sierra vs Microsoft and network/printer vs local pdf . This will narrow the problem further for troubleshooting.
We’re going to try updating one of the computers to Win 11 this week and I’ll post if it helps. We’d added a new computer recently that is running 11 and the receipt printer works (but it’s a computer that doesn’t need to print receipts that often so maybe we’ve just been lucky). What type of receipt printer are you using?
We have a mix of Windows 10 and 11 computers. Both versions have issues.
Our main issue has been with Spinal Labels and we are using Zebra printers.
Up until November, we never had any issues with printing.
We are running Windows 10 and have primarily been experiencing issues with receipt printers, likely because that’s where we do the highest volume of printing. We use a mix of printers: EPSON TM-T88IV, Star TSP650, StarTSP100IV.
We’ve had problems with all printer types.
Hello @SarahK, what were the results of your meeting with support yesterday? Thanks.
Hello. We didn’t come out of the meeting with any answers but we had a good conversation recapping the steps we’ve taken so far and clarifying the problem. Unfortunately, one of the experts was off sick but the team did give us a couple of things to try (ie. monitoring with ProcMon when a failure happens to see if we can figure out what is actually happening). We are also going to do some testing with SierraWeb to see if printing from there will succeed since it is taking a different path.
We also shared a link to this forum topic with the team and asked that they explore what might be similar about our environments for those of us that have started experiencing this issue. At the beginning of our meeting, they were still saying we were the only library.
They also shared some documentation on legacy printing settings since we’ve had to resort to turning off print templates on some workstations to get by, but that isn’t a great option for us since the printouts are not formatted as we would like them.
No solutions, but at this point, we are still troubleshooting and they indicated that they have been talking to engineers about the issue as well. We plan to try a few more things and then regroup with another meeting.