landscape printing problem

[Helge Blischke]

Christoph Litauer wrote:

[...]
> 
> Helge,
> 
> I'm sorry to say that the reason seems to be your pdftops filter ... I
> changed my config to use the original cups pdftops and got the correct
> output. I am using version 1.20.
> 
[...]

Christoph,

further research revealed that this is an issue caused by the Mac OS X 
printing system:
- when printing landscape on Mac OS X, the upper right corner values 
  of the MediaBox are exchanged ageinst the width and height of the
  selected media from the printer's PPD, i.e. the width of the media box
  is greater than the height.
- As CUPS still claims to support PostScript level 1 devices, which lack
  the pagedevice operators, the PostScript generating filter (cgpdftops on
  Mac OS X or pdftops otherwise) instead specifies the page size 
  parameters from the PPD.
- To correct the misplacement of the page content with respect to the
  media, the originating cupsd inserts an appropriate job attribute
  orientation-requested=n (n = 4 or 5).

On systems other than Mac OS X, the primary print job format is PostScript, 
not PDF, thus this problem does not show up.

And, to complete the story, the reason why my pdftops filter retained the 
media box settings for the page size specification was to let us print PDF 
files from whatever source without manually inspecting the files with repect 
to the page orientation and page dimensions.

Helge