Problems with printing landscape PDFs

[Nikolaus Rath]

Binary package hint: evince

1. Open the attached PDF
2. Select File -> Print Setup
3. Set Orientation to Landscape
4. Select File -> Print -> Print Preview
5. Preview shows a page in Portrait format with the "overlapping" part of the landscape PDF cut off.

Exactly the same happens when actually printing.

I am not sure if the result ought to be (a) a portrait printout containing the *rotated* landscape PDF
or (b) a landscape printout containing the unrotated landscape PDF, but clearly the current behaviour is very wrong.

It also seems to me that variant (a). is more likely to produce the desired result with all printers, but I might be wrong.

I'm using hardy.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

may you take a look to bug 172664 and see if the same symptons affects you?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

setting as triaged since you sent it upstream.

[Nikolaus Rath (nikratio)]

I also observe the symptoms described in bug 172664, but it seems to me that this has to be fixed at least partially in evince: the print preview is generated entirely by evince and not by cups, isn't it?

[adair (al-lairds)]

My system has suddenly developed this problem (Jaunty). It occurs across all viewers---evince, okular, gv, and xpdf---and in both dvi and pdf formats. Does not effect print output from Openoffice.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the current comment is a different issue and not an evince one

[Michal Suchanek (hramrach)]

In Intrepid Evince shows print preview as landscape but the printout is a landscape page shrunk to the top part of a portrait page.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

I am confused. You do know that, if the page is in landscape, you don't need to change anything in the print setup settings, just print as usual, and it should print in landscape mode, yes? I have actually confirmed this with the attached pdf on Jaunty.

[Nikolaus Rath (nikratio)]

At least in jaunty, printing a landscape PDF in portrait mode indeed produces a correct landscape printout. (I think that's what you mean with "print as usual", right?).

But why do I have to tell the printer to do the opposite of what I want? The current logic works fine if the PDF is in portrait mode, but if the PDF is already in landscape mode, things get very confusing.

Also, when I set the output to landscape (in case I actually want to print in portrait mode), the PDF is still cut off rather than scaled down.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

Yes, that's what I meant by "print as usual".

The pdf file format has an explicit knowledge of a page's orientation, but that is only used for diplaying, not printing. I.e. when you print a landscape page, it comes out of the printer in portrait orientation. The fact that you're confused by what the print setup options mean does not make this a bug...

Regarding the cropping or shrinking, you can always use the advanced tab in the print options dialog, but, I repeat, that is only to print the pdf differently that what you see in the viewer...

I'm closing this bug as invalid, I'm sorry for all the trouble you went through...

[Michal Suchanek (hramrach)]

This does not work for me in Intrepid.

To print a landscape PDF I had to rotate it to portrait.

However, a PDF might contain a mix of portrait and landscape pages and still should print out correctly. That is the landscape pages should be rotated so that they can be printed on portrait paper together with the portrait pages.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

michal, did you try with the pdf file attached to this bug report, or with another one?
have you tried with the latest ubuntu version (jaunty)?

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Upstream bug has been marked as duplicate of bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=599470

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

That's fixed upstream now.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package evince - 2.29.5-0ubuntu1

---------------
evince (2.29.5-0ubuntu1) lucid; urgency=low

  * New upstream version:
    New Features and UI Improvements:
    - Make Home/End keys go to first/last page in presentation mode too
     (lp: #285629)
    - Allow finish presentation by clicking on end page
    - Add custom print tab to printing dialog with several page scale options
      (lp: #276369)
    - Add support for remote files in evince thumbnailers
    - Add evince icon to the windows executable
    Bug fixes:
    - Fix transition of pages with duration=0 in presentation mode
    - Fix vertical white line shown in presentation mode with documents
      with black background
    - Fix fickering and blank screen issues when changing pages fast
      in presentation mode
    - Fix printing on Windows
    - Disable text selection in presentation mode
    - Make comics backend also compile on Windows
    - Remove comics_regex_quote() in favor of always using g_shell_quote()
    - Properly redrawn properties view when document is reloaded
  * debian/rules:
    - updated shlibs versions
 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:19:02 +0100

[Scott Lindsey (scottl-launchpad)]

Ubuntu, what happened? Can't even print pdfs reliably. Do I have to buy a mac? Ugh.

[Scott Lindsey (scottl-launchpad)]

Portrait, landscape, no different. What's the point of new whiz bang UI's if the OS can't print?