1072318 - Printing a PDF-Dockument with Multiple Pages on a Page (4->1)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Dennis Knorr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0
Build ID: 20140807131418

Steps to reproduce:

Load a PDF-Document with at least 4 Pages, Click File->Print, Register "Page Setup", Set "Pages per Side" to 4. and then Print.

example pdf file: https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/BSI/Zertifizierung/Interpretationen/AIS_46_ECCGuide_e_pdf.pdf?__blob=publicationFile


Actual results:

Nothing is printed. On Firefox 24 and Firefox 32. Perhaps this is a printer issue, as well, but we (city of munich, former limux project) had it as well with other printers.


Expected results:

4 Pages should be print on one side.

Comment 1

[Loic]

I tried to print this PDF with PDF Creator (OK, printing a PDF into another PDF is a little weird but it allowed me to print more 1 page per side) and it worked, I got 4 pages per side for the first 12 pages I printed.

Comment 2

[Dennis Knorr]

yes, that workaround works, but directly, it does not.

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Is printing 4 pages on one side working with other content like a normal webpage and you get this problem only with pdf documents ?
Do you use the integrated PDF viewer and not a third party plugin like Acrobat Reader ?

Comment 4

[Stefan Weiss [:sir_none]]

can you please give a short feedback on the last comment please?

as far as i know, the printing menu is not inside Firefox, because we are using ths print menu of the OS.
so you should have the same problem also in othere printing settups -- try with OpenOffice in your LiMux system :-)

Comment 5

[Max Harmathy]

This problem is not restricted to PDF input. A long webpage is sufficient.

Comment 6

[Stefan Weiss [:sir_none]]

Hi Max,

on what system are you? and what FF Version?
I just made some tests on Ubuntu 14.04 with FF 31 and it works.

Comment 7

[Max Harmathy]

Maybe it is a problem with the printing backend. I tested using a cups-pdf printer and a webpage as input and printed 4 pages on one.
* I can't reproduce it with 14.04 trusty. 
* On 12.04.5 precise when I print 4 pages on one, it produces 8 pages on one.
* On our 12.04.5 precise based LiMux-Distribution I could reproduce it with 24.7 esr and 31.1 esr

Comment 8

[t_d_l_c]

Hi, I'm also from the city of munich.
I think there are two problems when printing x pages to one page:
1.) The pages may be empty.
2.) The pages may not contain x pages, but x*x pages (I think). The multiple pages operation is probably executed twice. Only on Ubuntu 12.04, not 14.04.

I have tracked down the first problem a bit:
If I start firefox in terminal and print, I get a gtk-warning about an unknown page-size ("A4" is unknown, seemingly must be "iso_a4"). Then only an empty page ist printed when printing 2 on 1. I could recreate the problem by editing the prefs.js:

user_pref("print.print_paper_name", "iso_a4lkoihlkjl");

Then the following warning is issued in terminal an the printed page (cups pdf printer) is empty:

(firefox:20038): Gtk-WARNING : Unknown paper size iso_a4lkoihlkjl

With the following entry in prefs.js the page is not empty, even though it's then "4 on 1" instead of "2 on 1":
user_pref("print.print_paper_name", "iso_a4");

Comment 9

[t_d_l_c]

Build the Ubuntu14.04-Package of gtk+2.0-2.24.23 for our Ubuntu12-derivate and installed:
sudo dpkg -i libgail18_2.24.23-0ubuntu1.1~lhm1_i386.deb libgtk2.0-0_2.24.23-0ubuntu1.1~lhm1_i386.deb libgtk2.0-common_2.24.23-0ubuntu1.1~lhm1_all.deb
Tested with Firefox35 on our ubuntu12-derivate:
Problem 2.) still occurs.

Comment 10

[t_d_l_c]

concerning problem 1.), we have set:
pref("print.postscript.paper_size", "A4")

Comment 11

[Michael Weghorn]

I am also from the City of Munich.

As it turned out, the problem that printing multiple pages on one results in too many pages printed on one (e.g. 16 pages on one instead of 4) is not related to Firefox.

It is a problem in the "cups-filters" version packaged with Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise" and occurs also when printing from other applications (e.g. Evince).

There is also a bug ticket about this on the Ubuntu bug tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups-filters/+bug/1002813

This is fixed in newer versions of the package, therefore it does not occur in later versions of Ubuntu (s. comment 9 in the Ubuntu bug ticket: "Should be fixed in cups-filters 1.0.24-1 in Quantal.")

Comment 12

[t_d_l_c]

I think this bug can be closed. 
1.) The empty-pages problem can be solved using a correct paper size. You might consider making Firefox/Thunderbird more fault tolerant concerning bad values for the page size thought. But this is not an important issue to me.
2.) The n*n instead of n pages on 1 problem is a bug in cups-filters.

Comment 13

[t_d_l_c]

it's though not thought in the 3rd line, sorry..

Comment 14

[Stefan Weiss [:sir_none]]

closed because of last comments