Comment 2 for bug 600764

The problem is the following:

In Ubuntu we have a PDF-based printing workflow. All jobs arriving at CUPS are turned to PDF by filters which ship with the CUPS package. Then the pdftopdf CUPS filter does page management (N-up, reverse order, selected pages, ...) and then PDF data is passed on to the driver or the backend. As the cups-pdf backend already receives PDF this way it does not call Ghostscript any more but simply passes the incoming PDF through into the output file. Therefore the Ghostscript command line in the configuration file is ignored. If we had cups--pdf not supporting the PDF workflow as before we would get incoming PostScript be turned to PDF, then page management applied, after that the PDF turned to PostScript again for cups-pdf turning it to PDF the second time. Even if all is digital this is not without losses. The quality of the resulting file is much worse, especially in terms of resolution and size, perhaps also in color, than the original file. Having only one conversion from PostScript to PDF gives much better output. Newer applications even output PDF directly and so there is no conversion at all.