Comment 1 for bug 1464783

According to Mike Sweet [1]:

"Dec 28, 2007 by Michael Sweet:
The 1.1.x (and 1.0.x) behavior was incorrect. According to the IPP specification, number-up is applied *first*, and page-ranges refers to the imposed pages. Similarly, page-set is applied after imposition."

and here [2]:

"Nov 16, 2008 by Michael Sweet:
IPP specifies the page-ranges applies after imposition, so the current implementation is correct.

I'll add a note to the documentation about the behavior."

My man page of lp(1) says:

" -P page-list
            Specifies which pages to print in the document. The list can contain a list of numbers and ranges (#-#) separated by commas (e.g.
            1,3-5,16). The page numbers refer to the output pages and not the document's original pages - options like "number-up" can affect
            the numbering of the pages."

And -P is just a shortcut for page-ranges=.

For that reason pstops handles page-ranges the way it does. And pdftopdf deliberately follows pstops' logic.

However I don't know which IPP specification Mike references here. From my understanding of RFC2911 (IPP 1.1), Section 15.3 [3], page-ranges is applied in step 2, and number-up is applied only in the next step 3. Maybe Mike can shed some light on this issue?

[1] http://cups.org/str.php?L2643
[2] http://cups.org/str.php?L3008
[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2911#section-15.3