Fiery reversing duplex settings out of Acrobat

[AndrewB1234 · Accepted solution]

I worked out what was going on with this yesterday, and it turns out to have been a relatively simple series of events.

I usually have Acrobat set to Autorotate pages. So when I'm printing an A4 document, all the landscape pages rotate the correct way for duplex long-edge binding. Because of this, it doesn't matter whether I have Portrait or Landscape selected in Page Setup because Acrobat will make everything the right way around.

However, if I am printing to A3, and my Page Setup is set to Portrait, Acrobat rotates the A3 page to match, so the Fiery sees it as a portrait A3 page. Thus my setting to punch on the left (A3 short edge) is ignored, because what I see as the left on my preview is now the top as far as the Fiery is concerned because it's been sent a portrait page out of Acrobat. It sees me wanting to punch 4 holes in the long edge of an A3 and ignores it (not sure why it ignores it rather than failing, as other minor infractions on what is possible fails, such as trying to print on label stock with face-down output)

The next step I'm a little unclear on, but I assume that the Fiery sees a Portrait A3, knows that it can't print a portrait A3 and rotates it to Landscape. This means that it's been rotated 90 degrees by Acrobat and then 90 degrees by the Fiery, and I end up with something that is 180 degrees from what I was expecting.

[AndrewB1234]

Thanks for your troubleshooting Advice Joe: understand that Fiery is a separate entity! I might take the question across to the EFI forums and see if anyone has experienced a similar issue.

Xerox came out and reinstalled the server a few months ago for a separate issue so I'm hoping it's all up to date, however they have advised us not to enable the auto updates so I can't really follow your steps below without the risk of installing something that they don't want on there (apparently not all updates are suitable for Asia Pacific?).

I have a job that does weird things archived on the server so at least I have something to show the tech next time we get one out!

[Joe Arseneau]

No idea, to reverse that we can also state "Why did it work when you did not use Acrobat at all and imported direct to the Fiery"

In the end, I am a guy on the internet who has never been to your location, has no idea as to how you run your equipment and what you are running.

Anything I state on this forum about "try this" is an educated guess through experience of a similar manner, If I state "This is the fix" it typically means I 100% know the issue, it has gone through official testing and the following is exactly what the fix is.

I'm not a shill for Xerox (though I am an employee), I don't work for EFI at all.

If you want to troubleshoot on the EFI spectrum, Give it the proper DNS settings, enable auto updates, get it patched up fully, send a job that will corrupt like this one, stop it when it does , then re-print it from within CWS5, if it doesn't do hole-punch, the issue is in a Fiery cache somewhere, if it doesn't, you are back to your own PC.

[AndrewB1234]

Hi Joe. Understand the part about Acrobat corrupting the job data: sounds plausible. However... how do we account for the job in the Fiery showing "4-hole punch" but not actually punching? If there were something wrong with it I'd expect the job to fail, rather than print and ignore the setting?

[Joe Arseneau]

So the issue is the PC then, not the driver, Acrobat is filling it's buffer and corrupts the job data, so you would not necessarily need to reboot, possibly just close and re-open Acrobat.

Or add RAM to the PC.

Print as image would likely increase job size, but may reduce that buffer/cache.

LPD instead of RAW for the printer port PC side would reduce spool size (But since it's a Fiery, this is near certain to already be done)

[AndrewB1234]

Ran it again with "Rotate 180" turned on and it prints and folds the right way around. However it still won't hole punch, despite the settings having punch edge as left and punch style as 4-hole.

[AndrewB1234]

So actually after writing that perhaps "duplex reversed" is simply what it looks like when printing a normal A4 document, as the duplex setting in the case of my A3 yesterday wasn't involved.

[AndrewB1234]

Hi Joe,

What happens is that at some stage during the day when I'm doing a lot of printing from Acrobat (when a tender is due and we're constantly sending files) the duplex setting will get reversed. Just yesterday I was printing an A3 with half Z fold and it was folded the wrong way (on the binding edge instead of the other edge) which makes me think the image itself has ended up rotated 180 degrees. I can't see that the printer itself could suddenly fold it differently! I also had it set to hole punch but it ignored that so the page isn't punched either.

Once this starts happening, I need to restart or things will keep going that way. Any jobs in the Fiery printing incorrectly will continue to print incorrectly: I re-ran the one from yesterday and it was still the wrong way around.

This only happens when printing from Acrobat: if I drag to CWS it prints fine, which is what I did with that page yesterday to avoid a restart. And it doesn't always happen: only after I've printed a fair few things.

[Joe Arseneau]

I'm a little lost as to what your PC restarting would accomplish.

If you have a Fiery, you would be restarting the job from the Fiery within CWS, nothing in doing that would apply to your PC, CWS is just a window to the files in the Fiery.

If you are resending the file entirely, because the duplex is still wrong when re-released from CWS, that would imply the Fiery is corrupting jobs mid run, in which case, memory would be the likely issue, RAM would be the start point.

If the jobs from CWS mess up mid run, and work again when re-released within CWS, it is likely a memory issue IOT side, this may be resolved via firmware pdate, or by increasing the LPD buffer on the IOT itself (Set it to HDD)

[AndrewB1234]

I've been having an issue for a couple of months now that "after a while", by which I mean after having printed a number of documents out of Acrobat, the Fiery will start to give me the opposite duplex options of what I want. If I select "top-top" the item will come out with "top-bottom" duplexing. Inevitably this will happen at the tail end of a tender as we're rushing to get all the documents out.

Opening the job in Command Workstation, it says the option is indeed set to "top-top" as I requested. If I change it to "top-bottom" and run it again, it comes out "top-top". The only way to get printing back to normal is restart my computer.

This is on Windows 10, Fiery EX-i80 Server v1.2.