Word documents not printing collated copies

[David Landgren]

Hello,

I have a curious problem that I'm having a lot of difficulty in tracking 
down. I have Samba printers that talk to a Cups backend. Everything 
works correctly, execpt for collated copies under Word or Excel (Office 
2003).

Consider a 3-page document, for which a user requests two copies. They 
tick the "collated copies" checkbox. The correct behaviour is to print 
the pages in the order 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.

I am experiencing two different anomalous behaviours. On some printers 
the pages come out in the order 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3. On some other printers 
the pages come out in the order 1, 2, 3. I.e., the second copy is ignored.

Other applications seem to work just fine. I have looked at this from a 
number of angles and I'm still not sure of a line of attack.

What I do know is that it used to work when the users hit the printers 
directly with the HP JetAdmin software. It also used to work on a 
Solaris box using Solaris' lp subsystem with Samba 2.2.x. And it does 
not work with Samba 3.0.11 and Cups 1.1.23.

Has anyone else encountered this behaviour?

Thanks,
David