Created attachment 90227
pdftops-origpagesizes-fixes.diff

In reality the fix is in the PostScript output device, but there is no appropriate item to select as component.

There are some distro bug reports about Landscape-oriented page printing with CUPS (1.6.x or newer), cups-filters, and PDF->PostScript conversion with Poppler's "pdftops":

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=768811
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/1243484
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler/+bug/1247740

As a quick workaround distro package maintainers have removed the "-origpagesizes" from the call of Poppler's /usr/bin/pdftops by the /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops filter of cups-filters. I have not taken this workaround patch upstream into cups-filters as the real problem is in Poppler's PostScript output device.

When printing with CUPS 1.6.x or newer print jobs in PDF format are first treated by the pdftopdf filter (of cups-filters). One thing this filter does is rotating Landscape-oriented pages by 90 degrees for printers which take their paper only short-edge first (portrait orientation). For this rotation not the actual file content is rotated, but a rotation field is set (usually incremented by 90). You can see it by running "pdfinfo" on the input and on the output of pdftopdf. If the first page of the PDF file is Landscape-oriented, the "Page rot:" entry will change by 90 degrees.

I have displayed such a PDF file with several different viewers (evince, gs, gv) and the rotation field is taken into account, Landscape-oriented pages are rotated. Only when I run such a file through

pdftops -origpagesizes

the rotation is not taken into account and in the resulting PostScript file the Landscape-oriented pages appear unrotated, leading to wrong printouts when the /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftops filter calls "pdftops -origpagesizes". This was leading to the wrong printouts the users complained about in the bug reports. The workaround of dropping "-origpagesizes" works well if all pages of the input document are of the same size but if they are variable sizes, pages can get cut or squeezed (this is why I contributed the "-origpagesizes" mode to Poppler earlier).

I looked into the implementation of "-origpagesizes" and realized that I forgot to take the rotation field into account. I also realized that the paperMatch mode of the normal PostScript output mode (if you run pdftops without "-paper", "-paperw", and "-paperh") is very similar to "-origpagesizes" and takes the rotation field into account.

So my attached patch folds the "-origpagesizes" mode implenmentation into paperMatch and only does slight modifications. The original paperMatch mode behavior is conserved to not break other programs using it.

The differences of the new "-origpagesizes" mode are the following:

1. The rotation fields of the input PDF pages are taken into account.

2. The "%%DocumentMedia: ..." and following "%%+ ..." lines are removed. Most PostScript displayers assume all pages being of the size in the "%%DocumentMedia: ..." line. Without these lines they have no problems displaying each page in the correct size.

3. The output pages are never centered, "-origpagesizes" activates "-nocenter" implicitly. Normally, there should be no difference as the output pages get the sizes of the input pages but there are some odd files which need this measure.

With this all PDF input files convert into PS output files where all pages display in the same size and orientation in the input and output files.