Poor print formatting in Evolution

[Greg Schneider]

Binary package hint: evolution

Everything seems to have broken with the latest version in Feisty. I'm finding that it prints with very small margins, often cutting off text, and always adds a blank sheet to the end.

The weird thing is that print preview looks the same way. I can't find a way to change paper size or any other options in Evolution itself, so I'm not sure where it's getting the settings from.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Apr 6 17:30:23 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evolution-2.10
Package: evolution 2.10.0-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcCmdline: evolution --component=mail
ProcCwd: /home/greg
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evolution
Uname: Linux gregubuntudesktop 2.6.20-14-generic #2 SMP Mon Apr 2 20:37:49 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

Nobody has this problem? I tried deleting the printer, making sure /etc/papersizes was set to letter, also set to default to letter in the printer properties plus then reinstalled the printer, but the same thing is happening. The strange thing is that it is also happening in print preview.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. Does it happen with evolution only?

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

As far as I can tell, yes. Printing in OO/Firefox/Gedit/Adobe PDF/Evince seems fine.

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

Just to update this - I reinstalled Feisty with my HP 1012 printer again, and I have the same problem, although /etc/papersize was correctly set to letter right away.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Could you give extra details on what the issues are exactly? Does it happen if you print to a pdf? The extra pages is known as bug #94774, bug #88926, bug #95359 describe some other issues. What do you try to print, mail, contacts, calendar? What exactly would you like to get changed?

[Stanley Sokolow (overbyte)]

I concur with Greg about Evolution's poor page layout problem. When I print an email message, the printing starts at top edge of paper and continues to bottom edge. There are no top and bottom margins. This is not merely a problem of setting the margins -- Evolution's page setup dialog doesn't provide any way to set margins at all. To see this, in the mail view, select an email message to view, then click Print and then the Page Setup tab. There are no margin setting parameters on the setup dialog. Moreover, the scale factor doesn't make any difference to the printout, still going from top edge to bottom edge of sheet even when scaling is set way down, such as to 60%. It appears that the Evolution developers just forgot to provide this very basic function -- getting an acceptable printout of a message. I am using Mozilla's Thunderbird email program instead of the integrated mailer in Evolution because Thunderbird does allow one to set top and bottom margins and even to put useful headers and footers on the pages. The only thing I can say about this oversight by the Evolution team is, "what were they thinking when they overlooked providing margins?" Is there a chance that the margins Evolution uses are actually found in some other printer definition file elsewhere in Linux?

[Stanley Sokolow (overbyte)]

One more idea: Since Evolution has is origin in Novell, I wonder whether Evolution on OpenSUSE does any better with print formatting. Anyone have OpenSUSE available to check it out? Maybe that will give a clue about where the margin settings are actually kept.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Marking as a duplicate of bug 86426. Please see this bug for current status (summary: printing is being revamped on Evo, and it is targeted for Evo 2.11.5). The additional page at the end is bug 94774, and will be monitored from there. Both bugs are tracking the equivalent Gnome bugs.