Comment 27 for bug 258421

I think the argument against doing what you suggest is that some printer drivers mess up the page management (is this even true? I don't know how cups operates and which part does the pagination.) and the evince guys wanted to produce a write once run everywhere solution.

Using gtk-print-operation the ranges and sheets that you mention should come out correctly (ie printing to a real printer with a recent version of evince), at least they do for me.

As for printing to file (which is known broken for the cases you mention) I have a patch in bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583429 which operates the way you explain it. The only thing remaining to be fixed is reverse printing of multiple pages per sheet.

I wrote a test-script (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583976) for automatically testing different print setting combinations and it should be possible to adapt it to test printers other than "print to file". (it uses the accessiblity extensions to interact with the UI)