Q: Dymo 4XL label printer pauses during printing
I recently bought a Dymo 4XL label printer for printing shipping/postage labels from Etsy, eBay and Amazon. I am saving the labels as PDFs and printing from Adobe Reader (even though I was able to print directly from the browser at times). The print job usually starts immediately, but then the print job stalls at 25% to 50% of the way through the process, the printer queue app shows the Dymo 4XL as "paused", often with an error message to the likes of "cannot communicate with the printer" (I can't recall exactly right now).
Hitting the Resume button usually ends up in the print job starting over from the top of the PDF, resulting in a label printed half on one label and half on the top of the next one. And the print job remains in queue with the horizontal "barber pole" progress bar. As id it was going to print the PDF a second time.
Unplugging the printer and plugging it back in seems to result in a successful print every time. It seems to be the successive prints that fail or get screwed up. With a limited supply of the expensive proprietary labels on hand, I am hesitant to just keep trying options. Often 2-3 labels are wasted per attempt.
This reply with instructions from Dymo says that they do not support connecting the printer to a USB hub. With 2 USB ports on my MacBook Pro, there's no way I can avoid using a hub. This seems ridiculous and very archaic. But I've not yet tried printing directly, although I have switched USB hubs for the next attempt.
When it works, it works great. I do not have any issues with page setup, printer setup, etc. Dymo help is abysmally awful, they just email PDFs of the FAQ and KB info on their website. I have reinstalled the software, but after seeing the thread linked to above, it seems the built-in uninstaller in Dymo's own installer doesn't cover these procedures. Unsurprising from an experience right out of my 1990 PowerMac 7100 experiences.
I have a Brother laser printer that has worked flawlessly for years, and on 2 different Macs. This is not an Mac issue, this is a Dymo issue. Anyone out there have a similar issue, and find any real-world solutions? I'll be doing the manual uninstall next, and from there try and print directly from the USB port. Just wondering if anyone has tried all of this and what the results were. Many reports on non-technical support forums like Etsy.com reveal plenty of similar issues, but little in the way of resolution.
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Posted on Jun 23, 2015 9:50 AM