Comment 53 for bug 382379

Duplex problem is mainly that the "sides=..." option supplied to CUPS does not get picked up. But this is not a pdftops problem where this bug is about. padtops was never resonsible to pick up the "sides=..." option. So the duplexz should have probably already failed with the old Ghostscript-based pdftops filter.

The background of the document is a really bad design which shouts for interferences both on the screen and on the printout. The blue background is a very fine blue and white chessboard structure and the yellow background are as fine little yellow squares on white. If you display the original file on the screen you see already the ugly interferences and every time new ones if you zoom into the document. The actual square patterns you will see with gv (install it from Universe). Open the original PDF with gv and then drag a small square with the middle mouse button and after that choose 64 in the menu, for 64 times magnification. Do this operation again in the magnified view to get 64*64 times magnification. Then you see the squares.

This structure stays perfectly conserved, when you turn the PDF into PostScript with Poppler

pdftops 00\ -\ Ziele_Inhalt_Literatur_VIS_Master.pdf

and this PostScript goes to the printer, causing a new interference, different to the ones which you have seen on the screen. I have done also a quick test with Ghostscript (much slower):

pdf2ps 00\ -\ Ziele_Inhalt_Literatur_VIS_Master.pdf

and the background is also perfectly conserved. So I can expect interferences on my printout, too. Perhaps the old Ghostscript-based pdftops turned everything into raster graphics and so blurred the background somehow and this way made this file print more nicely.

Unfortunately, we cannot accept a filter working this way, as otherwise users of print-into-PDF(SVG, PS)-file printers or users of large-format printers (sending A4 pages with the "fitplot" option) will complain.