Unable to print with accounting on Mac OS Mojave

[agamon]

Hello,

Here's how I've got my devices to work with Catalina 10.15.3.  

Remove old driver versions from the Mac. Delete Printer from Printer & Scanners in System Preferences. Download driver 5.4.2. During the installation phase when adding the printer be sure to add the printer by IP address. Under Protocol select Line Printer Daemon - LPD. 

Once the printer is added be sure to set up Adobe Reader as the default pdf reader.  To do so just right click on any pdf and you can select "Open With..." to choose Adobe Reader as long as you have it installed. Perform the normal set up for printing inside Adobe Reader using the users Accounting Code.  (Note: I set up one preset for color and one for B&W.)

Print to verify it works. 

Go to the web browser and test out the printing from the browser. Most of our users print directly from Google Chrome so this is key for us. The issue you may run into is when users toggle from pdf to brower print and back. 

[agamon]

uuuugh. This has been almost a year of Xerox Accounting nightmares for us. I might have a work around for you to try. Albeit NOT a great work around. And very time consuming. I'm just testing it now. I will get back to this thread and post my findings. 

[PWHammond]

Update to this tread even though I have started a new one for Catalina on this issue. As of the release of 10.15.3 we lost printing with accounting to our three WorkCentre Color C70 printers (all in high volumne locations). Same as early on - codes go over and jobs abort. So far only our C70's seem to be affected but this is most annoying. My test machine is running 10.15.3 with Xerox driver 5.4.2(2138) dated Dec 23,2019

If someone has a line to a newer driver and can share it - that woudl be great. Otherwise I am having folks use the print tab on the copier webpage for now. Pain in the tosh...

[Joe Arseneau]

Apple fixed it in Catalina (Finally) and it works with all manufacturers I've run (Epson/Konica/Canon/Samsung and Xerox)

[agamon]

Hows the situation now with the Catalina updates?  

[PWHammond]

Hi Vondes,

     Xerox released a new driver on October 7th for Catalina that is listed as version 5.3.0_2118. That version does support accounting in full 64 bit apps like MS Office 365 and Adobe CC 2019. But we still do not always get an account code prompt with Apple apps like Pages or Preview. We just give folks instuctions on going through the backdoor to put in thier account code. As one friend put it:

   "Have them go into print using system, show details, printer features, accounting and input the code."

    Having just done that in Safari it now seems happy to show me the code when I go print.

[vondes]

Oh, I forgot to mention that I'm using the latest driver for Mojave. It's actually the exact same file as for High Sierra, 4.19.3.

[jdn]

OK - In a puzzling turn of events, I upgraded a machine to Mac OS 10.15 Catalina and now the full Xerox Printer Driver (and accounting code screen) appears to be functional again! I have not upgraded my Xerox driver, and actually I was printing to an old WC7675 (my C70 is in another branch).

Does anyone else want to test and report back?

For my WC7675 I am using drver version 4.14.0 and printed from Safari and Preview with accounting code auto-prompted.

[Downingj]

But Joe,

You get the same validation error through Google Chrome... a Non-native Mac app... 

Library Validation failed: Rejecting '/Library/Printers/Xerox/PDEs/XeroxFeatures.plugin/Contents/MacOS/XeroxFeatures' (Team ID: G59Y3XFNFR, platform: no) for process 'Google Chrome(1699)' (Team ID: EQHXZ8M8AV, platform: no), reason: mapping process and mapped file (non-platform) have different Team IDs

How difficult is it to follow a validation process? How difficult is it for a dev team to work with apple on an issue? There is no reason for this problem to be going on this long. If you develop software for a computer and advertise and sale it under the guise of compatability. I shouldn't have to download adobe acrobat on every single computer in my building to be able to print a PDF.  I shouldn't be told it only works with non-native apps but then get the same console validation error in a non-native app, "Chrome".

[jdn]

Hi all - I posted the original thread on this a few years back ( https://forum.support.xerox.com/t5/Printing/quot-Xerox-Features-quot-driver-doesn-t-load-in-Safari-1... ) and have spent many hours researching the issue. 

Apple broke it. I found the developer documentation that talked about deprecating the interface that allows these fancy third party drivers with executable code. Apple's enforcement of this policy has been on an app level, starting with Safari and then branching out to others. It used to be one workaround was to do a pdf preview and then print from the Preview app, but now the preview app is locked up too. I guess Acrobat Reader is a new requirement... for now. Also been using Firefox instead of Safari because of this printing issue. 

Where to go from here? I see a few workarounds...

You specifically asked if there was a way to automate/script the programming in of accounting codes into a saved preset. The answer is yes. I haven't devised exactly how I want to implement this, but the following commands could be used based on a login script or maybe a custom app that prompts the user for their code and makes the change for them. I push out a couple presets... a mix of single sided vs double sided and b&w vs color. 

In this example, the preset is named "Xerox B&W Letter 1-sided". You can retreive the current setting with:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy com.apple.print.custompresets.plist -c "print :'Xerox B&W Letter 1-sided':com.apple.print.preset.settings:com.xerox.printsettings:XRAccountingUserID"

And you can set the code to 1234 with this

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy com.apple.print.custompresets.plist -c "set :'Xerox B&W Letter 1-sided':com.apple.print.preset.settings:com.xerox.printsettings:XRAccountingUserID 1234"

If the key doesn't exist, I believe set will fail. You can add it with this command. Unfortunately it will fail if the key already exists. 

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy com.apple.print.custompresets.plist -c "add :'Xerox B&W Letter 1-sided':com.apple.print.preset.settings:com.xerox.printsettings:XRAccountingUserID integer 1234"

I hope this helps. If you create something from this, I would love to see what it is!

Another thought I had was to try making our own in house ppd for our machines, including the most used options in the majority of our use cases in a simple non-binary driver. Not sure if you can include a free-form input field to type in a passcode, or if you are limited to dropdown menus. 

Ideally Xerox would release a non-binary driver that was specifically built to be used by these sandboxed apps. Sure it wouldn't be pretty or even as easy to understand, but it would be something better than what pops up now in a sandboxed app. (see the previous post with screen shots). 

Again, if anyone is interested in sharing their in-house workarounds for this, I'd like to hear it. Would be great to pool our efforts.