162954 - double sided printing and multiple copies; collate checkbox disabled

Status: NEW

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect, P5)

Description

[ravi]

i have an html page that is 2 print pages. i am printing it on
a printer that prints double-sided. when i try to print two
copies of this page, mozilla sends two copies of the first
page and then two copies of the second page! this results,
with two copies of the first page on the first sheet of paper,
one on each side, and two copies of the second page on the
second sheet of paper!

i cannot see any advantage to this behaviour and the clear
disadvantage is that with the above style of printing, i
cannot get two separate copies of the page to hand out.

mozilla should send the two copies as all pages of the first
copy first and all pages of the second copy next. in fact,
it should send them as two separate print jobs, so that if
the web document is odd paged (for printing), the double
sided printer does not print the first page of the second
copy behind the last page of the first copy, on the same
sheet of paper.

Comment 1

[Daniel Wang]

This can be done by the 'collate' function which for some reason is
disabled in the print dialog.

closest bug to this is bug 23659

Comment 2

[sujay]

better description

Comment 3

[dcone (gone)]

You have to have more than 1 set in number of copies for the collate to show up.
 It works for me.

Comment 4

[dcone (gone)]

What I found was this:

1.)  If the printer supports collate it can only be enabled when you have more
than    
     1 copy set.

2.)  If the printer does not support collate, this option is not available.

3.)  When I set the number of copies to 3 and used collate.. it only printed one 
     copy.  (THAT IS A BUG)

4.)  When I set the number of copies to 3 and don't use collate.. it works as 
     expected.. not collated and the correct number of copies.  IE works the same 
     way exept item 3 does print out the correct number of copies.

Comment 5

[ravi]

Attachment: jpg of missing collate button in print window

i have a potentially stupid question: what is meant by
printer supporting collating, and why is that needed? if
i have a document that is three pages, and i want to print
two copies of it, why would it be anything but obvious
that i want them in order? is it not enough that the
printer supports printing page 1-2-3, followed by page
1-2-3 (second copy), which all printers do?

attaching jpg of missing collate option on freebsd build
(old one: 2002080506) - there is no mozilla 1.1 freebsd
build at the ftp site's 1.1 release directory.

Comment 6

[rods (gone)]

we should support collation in Moz, this means we would have to implement
it...very time consuming

Comment 7

[ravi]

folks, please humour me a bit more: i do not see the need to
implement collating in mozilla to fix this trivial problem. of
course, in making that statement, i am assuming something about
the structure of the "print a web page" code. should it not be
a simple issue of changing the logic from "for each page, print
each copy" to "for each copy, print each page"?

Comment 8

[Jeremy Young]

It should be quite easy to do Collated printing even if the driver doesn't
"support" it.  It just means submit the print job multiple times.  

Is there a way to disable the number of Copies dialog field (through XUL, or
prefs.js...  Hopefully not requiring a re-compile :P )

Comment 9

[[e-mail]]

WFM (Win XP prof SP2, Firefox 1.5.0.1 ID:2006011112).

The reported Firefox version(s) are too old a build to analyze
bugs against now. The problem you are reporting may well have been fixed
already.

Could you please download a recent version or nightly build from
<http://www.mozilla.org/releases/nightly.html>, and then let us know if you
still see this problem?

Many thanks, Cigno

PS: The assignee isn't even available any more...

Comment 10

[ravi]

Cigno, yes it was against an old browser: but its an old bug -- was filed in 2002! And 3 1/2 years later I still am ignorant about why multiple copy printing was ever implemented as n copies of each page, rather than n copies of each document. Be that as it may, I will try to give this a shot... I do not have access to a duplex printer any longer but I can try to print to PDF and see what happens...

Comment 11

[[e-mail]]

Gadfly - I understand this bug is old. That is why I presumed it might have been solved already:

Whichever way I turn, it (at least to me) appears as if printing behaved exactly as you wished for. There is a collate option in the printing menu and it returns the wished for behaviours. (Firefox 1.5.0.3 ID:2006042618 (Gecko 1.8.0.3))

In particular: My double-sided printing of a 2 page HTML document results into equal behavior whether collated or not: two pieces of paper each with the two different pages on them.
For longer documents collating works as expected as well.

Can you still reproduce this bug?

Comment 12

[ravi]

Collated printing works i.e., it gives me two copies: all pages of the first copy first and then all pages of the second copy next.

However:

a) I do not have a FreeBSD machine any longer, so I cannot verify on the original platform I reported the bug on, unfortunately. This is significant because the "collate" checkbox was greyed out on FreeBSD builds.

b) I do not have access to a duplex printer, so I cannot verify that the last page of the first copy and the first page of the second copy are not printed on the same page (in cases where the number of pages is odd). If this does happen, I would call this a serious bug, and so perhaps we can leave this bug open until someone with a duplex printer can verify it?

Comment 13

[[e-mail]]

Comment #12: Setting OS accordingly to FreeBSD to attract users of that OS to verify.

Since the assignee is not available any more and in order to attract devs, removing assignment.

Comment 14

[Ioana (away)]

QA doesn't have FreeBSD either. If anyone does have access to this OS, please see if this issue still reproduces on current Firefox builds and update this report.

Comment 15

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Decreasing the priority as no update for the last 2 years on this bug.
See https://github.com/mozilla/bug-handling/blob/master/policy/triage-bugzilla.md#how-do-you-triage 
about the priority meaning.