The Samsung Universal Print Driver causes the printer to print documents without white space, including paragraph whitespace, breaks, page margins and header footer margins

System Requirements:

  • Samsung CLP-300N
  • Samsung Universal Print Driver

The Problem:

It’s a Samsung printer driver problem reprise! For those not familiar with the self evident truth that Samsung have never quite managed to develop a competency in writing printer drivers, you may with to familiarise yourself with the last inexplicable printer driver problem that I found and just how unhelpful Samsung themselves were about my trying to report it to them.

The latest native driver for the CLP-300N is a release from the 20th October 2009. It is also possible to get it working via Windows Update using this driver under Windows 7. However, for the last year I have been experiencing a problem: Microsoft Word will not print unless it is in greyscale.

I’ve tried uninstalling the print drivers, altering the default and enforced printer settings – all of which are set to colour – and the instant you leave the printer configuration dialogue in Word 2010, the driver resets back to greyscale. Inexplicable and a problem that is not present in other applications; including other parts of Office 2010, Adobe reader etc.

My short-term fix was to print to PDF and then print from Adobe Reader directly to the CLP-300N. However this afternoon I was annoyed enough by it to fix it.

It’s obviously the driver. So I took it off again and ever hopeful attempted to see if there was a new Samsung driver – there wasn’t. Yet I did notice that like most printer manufacturers, the vogue at present is to offer universal PCL print drivers, for which the CLP-300N downloads page on Samsung.com did offer a 2013-03-09 (2013-03-15 signed) driver reportedly of version 2.50.02.00.03.

Fantastic! It fixed the problem and Word 2010 now printed in colour for the first time in a year without even a reboot. Except…

If we pretend that this was my document

<header>

Dear Sir,

Bla, bla, bla.

Bla, bla, bla.

Bla, bla, bla.

Bla, bla, bla.

Yours faithfully,

C:Amie

<footer>
<bottom of A4 page>

What I actually got was

<header>
Dear Sir,
Bla, bla, bla.
Bla, bla, bla.
Bla, bla, bla.
Bla, bla, bla.
Yours faithfully,
C:Amie
<footer><bottom of A4 page>

Oops.

 

The Fix

There isn’t any point in going into troubleshooting details on this, I spent about 20 minutes wasting paper on it and the driver doesn’t work. I’m not the only person to see this either.

View: Ubuntu Forums

The simple fix is to go back to the Samsung downloads page for printers and don’t select a model number. Head directly to the Samsung Universal Print driver page and download the latest release (2013-09-23 of version 2.50.04.00.08 as of writing).

This fixes the problem.

After last time, I’m not going to waste my phone bill or breath attempting to report it to Samsung.

If you want my advice, don’t buy their printers. If you don’t want my advice, don’t follow it.