printing pdf file 2 pages in 1 causes pdftopdf bug

[Laureano]

Hello.
I have an issue when trying to print one pdf file 2 pages in 1. A process called pdftopdf starts an uses all ram available and system freezes. I have to kill it from tty. Both with Cups pdf printer and with real hp printer. I have only tried to print few pages (not the whole document).
this happens with one single document (and it copies), as far as I have tried to the moment, with other files works ok.
To print that document 2 pages in 1 I have to use other viewer like evince.
(May be this is not a qpdfview bug but a pdftopdf bug).

The pdf version of the problematic file is 1.7
qpdfview 0.4.18
Mx Linux 19.2 (xfce 4.14)

Here is the output of pdfinfo to that file.

$ pdfinfo -f 1 -l 3 file.pdf
Creator: Adobe InDesign 14.0 (Windows)
Producer: Adobe PDF Library 15.0
CreationDate: Thu Mar 19 01:51:29 2020 -03
ModDate: Thu Mar 19 01:51:45 2020 -03
Tagged: yes
UserProperties: no
Suspects: no
Form: none
JavaScript: no
Pages: 676
Encrypted: no
Page 1 size: 396.85 x 566.929 pts
Page 1 rot: 0
Page 2 size: 396.85 x 566.929 pts
Page 2 rot: 0
Page 3 size: 396.85 x 566.929 pts
Page 3 rot: 0
File size: 4460128 bytes
Optimized: no
PDF version: 1.7

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello Laureano,

thank you for taking the time to report this. However, I fear we can do nothing about this in qpdfview as we only send the unmodified PDF document to CUPS and set the parameter "number-up" for the job. The actual transformation of the pages is done by CUPS internally, usually via a set of utilities called cups-filters [1] which includes pdftopdf.

Put differently, you should be able to reproduce the issue by printing from the command line using "lp -o number-up=2" without involving qpdfview at all. This means that you should probably report this with your distribution against its cups-filters package or directly upstream at [1]. (But they will probably ask about the file and reproducing the issue with the current stable version.)

Best regards,
Adam

[1] https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups-filters

[Laureano (laureanogasparin)]

Very thanks to you, Adam, for your explanation and suggestions.