Jon Peatfield wrote:
On Sat, 29 Mar 2008, John Summerfield wrote:
Jon Peatfield wrote:
Today a user reported that printing from evince requesting N copies
results in N^2 copies comming out of the printer.
Now a quick check shows that doesn't happen for trivial ps files but
does
for trivial pdf files.
What seems to be happening is that evince is converting the pdf to
ps and
doing the N copies itself but also passing the copies option into
cups so
the cups server then multiplies it again.
I can find code in evince (evince-0.6.0-8.el5 srpm) which while
converting
to postscript for printing sends each page N times. I can't find
where it
is actually sending the job to the printer specifying #copies but my
logs
on out print server show that the server is getting requests with
copies
set.
Doesn't the number of copies go into the .ps file itself?
There _may_ be a template around that gets munged.
Ah, I googled for "postscript language reference" it's all available
on Adobe's website, but you might prefer not to print it all.
[ I have a paper copy of the PS language reference (level-2) 'cos I
needed it for a previous (development) job ]
Look for where these are set:
#copies
NumCopies
Page 417 (which Evince thinks is page 431).
I hope it doesn't set those directly, since it would be bad form. Such
things are not supposed to be set by things except when sending directly
to a printer (in the same way that printer-specific options shouldn't be
used). It is possible that it is passing the copies through as a DSC
comment which cups is extracting but I hope not 'cos that would be
probably harder for me to hack...
It has a proper description of the printer, it gets the definition from
cups. I think it perfectly proper to assume the ppd it gets from cups
properly describes the final printer.
Spoolers such as cups aside, no program on *x should assume ot has a
real printer out there.
printing to a file doesn't explain anything.
I can, however, confirm the problem so it's worth reporting as a bug. I
asked for two copies of the current page and got four.
What evince *seems* to do is send each page N time itself (there is a
loop in the code which converts to postscript). Quite seperatly it
passes the number of copies through to the cups system so that when the
job is recieved the cups server passed N on the command line of the
pstops filter so it then causes N copies to be printed (either by
setting the relevant postscript options or sending pages multiple times
depending on other options which are set).
In a moment of absolute brilliance I sent off a print job but put on
hold so I can inspect it. There doesn't seem to be anything in the
postscript, but in the associated control file there's this:
0000240: 3030 2100 0663 6f70 6965 7300 0400 0000 00!..copies.....
0000250: 0242 0019 6a6f 622d 6f72 6967 696e 6174 .B..job-originat
which I don't understand, but it looks interesting. Nothing interesting
in the cups log, but you might want to try your hand with tcpdump to see
what the actual traffic is.
--
Cheers
John
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