Reporting problems with watermarking

This article explains how to report cases where PaperCut watermarks do not print on one or more pages in a document or where printing watermarked documents gives printer errors.

You should normally come here after reading about how to set up watermarking and checking that your watermark position is correct.

Step 1: Capture a spool file for support

1. Reproduce the watermarks not printing or document giving a printing error.
2. Without changing any printer driver settings, capture a spool file by following this KB article: Capturing a Windows Spool File If you use a different operating system please search our KB for “Spool” for more information.
3. Zip and email the spool file(s) to PaperCut for analysis.
4. Include the manufacturer, model name and version of the driver in the report.
5. Include a download link for the driver file you are using.
6. Send the source document in your report if possible. If you do not wish do this then please include a brief description of the document. e.g. “6 page MS Word document with tables and color images”.

This should be sufficient to diagnose most watermark problems and usually your support case will end here.

However there a few cases where watermark problems will not reproduce with these steps and you will be asked to do the following:

Step 2: Capture logs

1. Enable “development” logging in the PaperCut Print Provider. This is described in here and you will need to set debug=development in print-provider.conf . This will show PaperCut support exactly where watermarks are being inserted in the files that you are printing.
2. Reproduce the watermarks not printing or document giving a printing error.
3. Without changing any printer driver settings from item 2, capture a Spool File If you use a different operating system please search our KB for “Spool” for more information.
4. If you are seeing watermark problems with more than one document then if possible repeat 2 for several documents.
5. If you are seeing watermark problems with more than one printer then if possible repeat 2 for several printers.
6. Disable “development” logging in print-provider.conf. You can do this by commenting out the line you added in 1 with a “#” to make it #debug=development.
7. Zip and email all the Print Provider logs [app-path]/providers/print/[platform]/print-provider.log* and the print-to-files to PaperCut for analysis.
8. Include the manufacturer, model name and version of the driver in the report.
9. Include a download link for the driver file you are using.
10. Send the source document in your report if possible. If you do not wish do this then please include a brief description of the document. e.g. “6 page MS Word document with tables and color images”.

The logs will allow the PaperCut support team to match the print-to-files to what was printed on your printer.

This should be sufficient to diagnose almost all watermark problems.

Keywords: watermark , watermarking , watermarks , diagnosis , diagnostics