A4 paper size incorrect in HP c7200

[Tom Louwrier]

hi guys,

Oneiric amd64, Dell Latitude 131L, daily updates.

I'm having a weird issue when printing that seems to have appeared sometime last week.
Every other couple of days I'm printing a set of documents for my customers. These have not been edited for several months. So far printing from LibreOffice everything went correctly. Yesterday I found that the top and bottom 1cm of my prints get cut off.

My printers are HP LJ2500, PS c7200, PS4500 or Samsung clx3175 depending on my location.

I found out that the problem seems to be confined to the c7200.
All printers are set up for A4 paper, so are the documents' page sizes. When I go to the print menu, I see the paper sizes next to the little preview on the left. In most cases it is correctly marked as 297 x 210 (A4). When choosing the c7200 however the paper size changes to 294 x 210. No (A4) indicated either.

These documents have very small margins, as close I can get to no margin at all (there is a banner at top and bottom). However I've checked with a newly created, completely blank document in LO Write and it behaves the same way.
Opening a fresh document in Calc and setting it to A4 gives weird paper sizes for all printers but the LJ2500.

There were updates to CUPS last week, I'm figuring that somewhere along the line the definition of A4 in the driver for the c7200 got messed up. It really should be 210 x 297, not 294.

Let me know if you need more information.

cheers
Tom

[Lars Karlitski (larsu)]

Hi Tom, thank you for reporting this bug.

This looks fairly similar to bug #872160. Please mark this bug as a duplicate and subscribe to the other one if you agree.

Otherwise, could you please attach the PPD file you are using and CUPS's error_log in debug mode? You can find instructions on how to obtain these at

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingPrintingProblems

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Lars, Tom, this is not a duplicate of bug 872160.

Bug 872160 is about a regression on black-and-white laser printers (see especially the last comment from Jiri Popelka), whereas here we have an artifact of HP's way to have the same page size with different unprintable margins for different printing needs: Standard size for duplex printing, a small margins size, and a borderless size.

Tom, if you do not need to print your job double-sided, try the small-margin and/or borderless A4 size as a workaround. Note that for duplex printing on HP's inkjets there are unprintable margins of a width of 1/2 inch or 12.8 mm at the top and at the bottom. This is a mechanical limitation of the duplex unit. The standard size restricts the borders to this.

Note that the borderless size suggests an absolute paper size bigger than standard A4, as here the printer prints somewhat bigger than the paper, the so-called overspray. This is to assure that the print gets really to the borders, even with tolerances in putting in the paper. One could think about using negative unprintable margins then, but PPD files do not support this.

[Tom Louwrier (tom-louwrier)]

Hi Til,

I tried the other paper sizes (small margin and borderless) but no result.
Playing around with settings for duplexer (installed / not installed)
and duplex printing (on / off) does not make any difference either.

Then yesterday I got updates to both Cups and HPLip, I tried today but
got the same. A4 on the c7200 defaults to 294 x 210, no (A4).

Mind you: the duplexer is installed, always was, but I hardly ever print
double sided. These documents have been coming out correctly until about
a week ago, maybe ten days. I feel this does not have much to do with
how HP handles papaer sizes and printing margins, I would have come
across that long ago. In fact if it weren't for Ubuntu, Cups and HPLip I
would have returned this device years ago, let's say about a week after
purchase. The HP supplied Win software sucks *very big time*, no matter
what version.

Hoping to hear from you.

cheers
Tom

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

A4 Borderless should work for you. If I choose this (I have the OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus and the A4 of this printer is also 210 x 294 mm) I get a frame which is somewhat too large for A4 (214 x 301 mm) and LibreOffice centers the document in a too large frame. As in borderless mode your printer should print everything which fits onto the paper, your document should get completely printed. In general, this is the solution for printing content which has parts getting too close to the borders.

Strangely enough, LibreOffice does not accept the selection "A4 Small Margins". It always falls back to "A4" then.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

There seems to be a bug in the print dialog of LibreOffice: It seems that if you choose a paper size from the PPD which has the dimensions of a known standard size, it derives the size name from the dimensions and then switches to the PPD paper size with this name, even if that size has other dimensions:

User chooses "A4 Small Margins" from PPD -> Dimensions in PPD: 210 x 297 mm -> LibreOffice: 210 x 297 mm is A4 -> LibreOffice chooses "A4" from PPD -> 210 x 294 mm

LibreOffice has to obey the user's choice and not try to "correct" the user's choice. This is a bug in LibreOffice. Moving ...

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Lars, make sure that this works correctly in the CPD.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Tom, if you cannot set the page size to "A4 Borderless", please attach your PPD file (/etc/cups/ppd/<name of queue for PS C7200>.ppd) to this bug report.

[Tom Louwrier (tom-louwrier)]

hi Till,

Sorry for not responding earlier, things are very busy over here.

I've been using a workaround for a while, until I had to do some
maintenance on my wife's pc. She spends a lot of time on the Dark Side
(vista) so that gave me the opportunity to separate updates to
LibreOffice, Cups and HP-Lip and test.
To my surprise I could not replicate the issue on that pc.

So I decided to delete the C7200 printer on my system and add it again
from scratch. Guess what? Issue gone.
Can't be sure what caused this now, but happy I can rely on my printer
again. It may have had to do with adding the device from HPLip or from Cups.

You can close this bug if you want. If you still would like some more
information from me / my pc, let me know.

cheers
Tom

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Tom Louwrier, this bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed. For future reference you can manage the status of your own bugs by clicking on the current status in the yellow line and then choosing a new status in the revealed drop down box. You can learn more about bug statuses at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status. Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please submit any future bugs you may find.