Duplex printing chaos

Michael Sweet mike at easysw.com
Fri Sep 10 12:28:52 PDT 2004


Helge Blischke wrote:
> A few hours of testing with various printers from different vendors
> showed up at least three different variants of how duplex and tumble
> are interpreted:
> 
>     duplex tumble    media is turned around an axis
>     ----------------------------------------------------------------
> (1) true   false     parallel to user coordinate system's Y axis
>     true   true      parallel to user coordinate system's X axis
> 
> (2) true   false     the long edge of the physical media
>     true   true      the short edge of the physical media
> 
> (3) true   false     parallel to the leading edge of the media
>     true   true      perpendicular to the leading edge of the media
> 
> That means,
> (1) above conforms to the PostScript specification
> (PLRM 3rd ed., page416);
> (2) above conforms to what RFC 2911 tells about the sides attribute,
> (3) is sort of weird to me (though I think I understand how it is
> technically achieved).
> 
> Are there any plans to force a device independent handling of the
> sides attribute, e.g. by specifying which of the above interpretations
> holds in the printer's PPD and tweaking either the attributes sent
> to the printer or the feature statements put into the PS setup?

No, since we've never had a problem with this. Setting
"sides=two-sided-long-edge" == DuplexNoTumble,
"sides=two-sided-short-edge" == DuplexTumble.  If the printer has
a different (non-Adobe) interpretation of this, then the PPD
commands can handle the mapping.  Internally the difference is just
whether the back side image is rotated 180 degrees, and we don't
care whether the leading edge is the long or short one.

The Adobe naming is logical and consistent for all media sizes.
The IPP naming is not logical and is a throw-back from the printer
MIB (which is very laser-printer-centric).

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Printing Software for UNIX                       http://www.easysw.com




More information about the cups-devel mailing list