Cups PDF Filter Crashes

Problem: for some PDF files cups does not print the page, the web gui just tells “filter failed” and in the cups logfile you find

[Job 528] PID 19521 (gs) crashed on signal 11!

Discussion: cups on debian uses ghostscript as pdf renderer. The pdf renderer of ghostsciprt crashes on many files. You can test by simply running pdf2ps on the pdf file, and see if it is the same for you.

Solution: you can configure the pdf renderer that cups should use. I changed it to pdftops from the “poppler-utils” package.

Install “poppler-utils” using aptitude or apt-get and add the following line to /etc/cups/printers.conf in the printer section:

Option pdftops-renderer pdftops

Versions: debian-8.6 with ghostscript 9.06~dfsg-2+deb8u1 and cups 1.7.5-11+deb8u1