loosing %Title info => cups-pdf save as "_stdin_"

[Jean Christophe André]

Binary package hint: cups

1) Ubuntu release: Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
2) Package version: cups 1.3.9-17ubuntu3.2
3) What did I expect: PDF generated from printing through cups-pdf saved using the document title (from %Title in Postscript) as the file name ; it was working this way in Intrepid.
4) What happened instead: file are always saved as "_stdin_" (literally, and so overriding each other, but there is a workaround for this) whatever the document title is.

cups-pdf use the document %Title information to generate the filename for the PDF to be saved. I discovered that the document entering cups-pdf processing was lacking this information, while it was available in the original Postscript document. So it's not a cups-pdf problem but a CUPS document processing instead.

After investigating more, by putting cupsd LogLevel to debug, I also discovered that CUPS does process documents aimed at cups-pdf this way:
[Job 380] envp[21]="CONTENT_TYPE=application/postscript"
[Job 380] envp[24]="FINAL_CONTENT_TYPE=application/vnd.cups-postscript"
[Job 380] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pstopdf (PID 4490)
[Job 380] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftopdf (PID 4492)
[Job 380] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/cpdftocps (PID 4497)
[Job 380] Started backend /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf (PID 4503)

If I understand correctly, it first cleanup the Postscript code, then transform it into PDF (?), cleanup the PDF code and transform it back into Postscript before passing it to cups-pdf. I found that the pstopdf filter kept the %Title intact but the pdftopdf filter made it lost.

IMHO, but I don't know printing processing well, this is a just a wrong path for going to cups-pdf. CUPS should just pass it to cups-pdf, after the minimal Postscript code cleanup and that's it. So this is the solution I choose to apply at my office: I moved away the file "/etc/cups/pstopdf.convs" (and restarted the "cups" service) so CUPS knew no more how to convert from Postscript to PDF. This made my day: PDF printing was saved using their document title again.

So I declare this as a bug and suggest to take some action (may be mine, may be a better way) to allow other Ubuntu users to get it right without having to put their hand in it... ;-)

[Feanor (angelo-pantano)]

i have this bug too and as i try to export a powerpoint presentation in pdf using cups i lose the print setup too, for example rotating it etc. etc. it's not only a matter of file name

[Jean Christophe André (progfou)]

Does my proposed solution (moving away pstopdf.convs) works in your case?

BTW, how are you converting your PPT into PDF? Doesn't OpenOffice have a direct PDF rendering function (totally independent from CUPS) which could be used for that?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

Does this issue still affect cups-pdf 3.0.1 packages?

[Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk)]

This bug concerns an Ubuntu version that dates back from 2009.

Closing. Please feel free to re-open if the issue still affects current CUPS-PDF versions.