evince mishandles duplex printing of multiple copies of PDFs with an odd number of pages.

[zjohnson]

Binary package hint: evince

First of all thank you for developing a fairly nice and intuitive document viewer, and if this bug report is best submitted to some subsystem project which specificly handles printing, well I'm sorry and hope that someone can move it to the right place for me. :)

Okay so say you have an HP laserjet 4300 DN which is a duplex laser printer.

Say you have the proper PPD file for it.

Say you have a 3 (or any odd number) of pages in a PDF document

Say you want 2 copies of said document.

So you select print, and select 2 copies, and also confirm that "Page Setup->Two-sided" is already set to "Flip on Long Edge".

What you end up with is 3 pieces of paper. Each printed on both sides.

The main problems are that the 2nd piece of paper contains page 3 on one side, and page 1 on the other.

And the general side-y-ness is thrown off by 1 for the entire 2nd copy of the document.

I strongly think it should make the 2nd side of the 2nd piece of paper blank and start anew for the 2nd document. and I think most people would agree. :)

Also if you attempt to collate in the above situation things get even more silly. You end up with 3 pieces of paper. The first with page 1 printed on both sides and the 2nd paper with page2 on both sides, and so on.

BTW, I also tried this on a Xerox Phaser 8550 with its own PPD and experienced the same results.

Thank you,
Zachariah Johnson

[Alex Cornejo (acornejoc)]

I marked a two other bug reports as duplicates of this one (since this is the first report of such bug).

I believe this is an evince specific problem and not from cupsys, since when printing multiple copies of an image (single page document) from eog, the exact same printing dialog is presented (as in evince), however
the result is correct (two separate copies of the document are produced).

This bug is present in gutsy with latest updates.

[Alex Cornejo (acornejoc)]

I forgot to mention, the two other relevant bug reports where:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/151026 (Affects ubuntu)

and

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/172824 (Affects cupsys)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue seems to be similar to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365332 which has been fixed upstream now, a new version will uploaded before hardy stable

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package evince - 2.22.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
evince (2.22.1-0ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

  * New upstream version:
    Bug fixes:
    - Add compressed dvi to the list of supported mime types
    - Fix a crash when printing a range that doesn't specify the start
      or end page
    - Fix a crash when thumbnail failed to render in PS backend
    - Open default application when launching an external uri
    - Add a configure option to enable/diable DBus
    - Fix printing in documents with rotated pages
    - Do not append file extension twice when saving an image
    - Cancel find operation when the find bar is closed
    - Several printing fixes: collate, reverse and copies were broken
      (lp: #158483)
    - Fix selection rendering when poppler is compiled with splash backend
    - Other bugs fixed: #521224, #524112
  * debian/patches/60_gzdvi-support.patch:
    - dropped, fixed in the new version
  * debian/patches/99_autoreconf.patch:
    - new upstream version

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:41:05 +0200

[Evan Carroll (evancarroll)]

still present in Ibex.

[Evan Carroll (evancarroll)]

Ibex uses 2.24.1.

I did the same thing except I restricted my print to pages to 1-5, and printed double sided. One page had on one side the terminal page for the ending copy on the obverse, and the starting page on the reverse side.

[Evan Carroll (evancarroll)]

it apears as if this can happen even with even numbers ie, 1-6 on double sided pages with 2 pages per side.

you'll have the second page printed with half of one side, half of another.

[mannheim (kronheim)]

This bug is *not* fixed. This still happens with Jaunty and with the current Karmic version (2.27.3 at present).

Steps to reproduce:

(1) Print two copies of a 3-page document from evince, collated, with duplex on.

Expected results: you get four sheets of paper from your pinter, like so:

    First piece of paper: 1-2
    Second piece of paper: 3-BLANK
    Third piece of paper: 1-2
    Fourth piece of paper: 3-BANK

Actual results: you get three sheets of paper from your printer, each printed on both sides, like so:

    First piece of paper: 1-2
    Second piece of paper: 3-1
    Third piece of paper: 2-3

The attribution to gnome-bugs #365332 seems to be incorrect. That gnome bug is do with the confusion over what "collate" means. The relevant gnome bug seems to be #455759, "Two copies and duplex printing don't work well together".

[Bartek (tschew)]

I'm surprised about that though. I fixed the bug in the master branch with a limitation: inserting blank pages only works when the document is printed in whole. (it was a stupid idea, I know...) Did you select a 3-page range or did you print a real 3-page document?

There's a reworked fix in bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583429 but this has not been accepted yet because it is quite lengthy and messy.

[mannheim (kronheim)]

Bartek, you're right. I printed 3 pages of a longer document. Sorry about the mis-information.

[Adrien (lebarde)]

I would like to point that this issue has not been solved as of 2020 (Version 3.30). Thanks for reading!