Duplex printing on Ubuntu 12.10 is taking additional blank paper with 'scale to fit' option selected

[Ani Balakrishnan]

CORRECTION: The observations below are not correct. After exchanging e-mail with Sanjay Kumar from HP I found out the following:

cupsfilter -m application/vnd.cups-pdf -p /etc/cups/ppd/Officejet_Pro_8600.ppd -o PageSize=A4.Duplex –o fitplot -o Duplex=DuplexNoTumble /home/hptest/Desktop/A4test_2pages.pdf > out.pdf

gives an extra page and (removing "-o fitplot")

cupsfilter -m application/vnd.cups-pdf -p /etc/cups/ppd/Officejet_Pro_8600.ppd -o PageSize=A4.Duplex -o Duplex=DuplexNoTumble /home/hptest/Desktop/A4test_2pages.pdf > out.pdf

gives no extra page.

So the bug is in pdftopdf and not in Ghostscript. As there is no version of pdftopdf which uses Ghostscript, changing Ghjostscript does not change anything and this bug is not a Ghostscript bug. Moving to cups-filters.

Original report:

This bug is happening on:
Ubuntu : 12.10
GhostScript version : 9.06

How to Reproduce:
1. Configure any HP Officejet Device which supports duplex printing on Ubuntu 12.10 OS
2. Perform a duplex job from hplip toolbox, Document Viewer or LibreOffice Application with ‘scale to fit’ option selected.
3. Observed that device is taking additional blank paper
Investigation Details:
I have run ‘cupsfilter -m application/vnd.cups-pdf -p /etc/cups/ppd/Officejet_Pro_8600.ppd -o PageSize=A4Duplex –o fitplot -o Duplex=DuplexNoTumble /home/hptest/Desktop/A4test_2pages.pdf > out.pdf ’ to check pdftopdf filter output and is perfect.

Then I have run ‘cupsfilter -m application/vnd.cups-raster -p /etc/cups/ppd/Officejet_Pro_8600.ppd -o PageSize=A4Duplex –o fitplot -o Duplex=DuplexNoTumble /home/hptest/Desktop/A4test_2pages.pdf > out.raster ’ to see whether the Cups Raster which is fed in to hpcups is OK. I checked it with ‘rasterview’ (http://www.easysw.com/~mike/rasterview/index.html) and one extra blank page is created here.

Additional Information:
1. This bug does not happen with any other distros than Ubuntu 12.10 64bit and 32bit Oss
2. This defect does not occurs if ‘fitplot’ option is not passed
3. Tried downgrading the ghostscript version to 8.71 and found pdftopdf filter itself adds one extra blank page to the output.

Thanks and Regards
Ani Balakrishnan

[Ani Balakrishnan (anib)]

Attached the input document 'A4test_2pages.pdf' also

[Tobias Hoffmann (smilingthax)]

A very similar problem has been fixed very recently,
  https://bugs.linuxfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1088

which is fixed in bazaar revision 7036.

Please check if the bug still occurs with the current bzr version of pdftopdf/cups-filters.

  Tobias

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Tobias, I did my tests with exactly this version (rev 7036) and could reproduce this bug.

[Tobias Hoffmann (smilingthax)]

Till, that's very strange. I can only reproduce the bug with rev 7035, but not with 7036.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Sorry, I "bzr pull"ed, did a "make" and the problem was still there, now I did a "make distclean" and rebuilt everything and the problem went away. Tobias, your fix fixed this bug, too. Thank you very much.

Sanjay, Ani, please test with the current BZR snapshot of cups-filters. This should solve the problem.

[Ani Balakrishnan (anib)]

With bzr snapshot (rev 7036), the bug is not reproducible.

Thanks and Regards
Ani Balakrishnan

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Fixed in upstream release 1.0.30 which is used in Raring.