[cups.general] Printing confusion between A4 and letter

Berend De Schouwer berend.deschouwer at ucs-software.co.za
Sun Feb 20 23:12:52 PST 2011


Hello,

I've got some documents I'm trying to print to Cups via
cupsPrintFile().  The documents are PDF, and the page size in the PDF is
A4.  The locale settings are en_ZA (ISO A4)  Common stationary is A4.

The printer is a multifunction printer with multiple paper trays.  The
printer assumes that both A4 and Letter stationary is available, in
separate trays.  If you attempt to print A4, it will look for A4
stationary, and if you print Letter, it will attempt to print Letter
stationary.

The printer is an old Xerox printer, that appears as an OKI on the
network.  It's set up using the socket:// backend, and it's setup as a
HP LaserJet, since it does understand PCL.

The PPD's default PageSize is A4, and the default Tray is 'default'  I
don't know which actual tray on the printer this maps to.

When printing plain text to the printer, it works.  When printing PDFs,
the printer looks for Letter stationary.

Printers with a single tray and the same setup tend to work.  Probably
because the printer firmware doesn't look for different stationary,
because there is only one tray.

If I look at /var/spool/cups/, for the control file (c0001, etc.) no
paper size is set.  I can force it with lpr -o media=a4, but it appears
that no actual paper size is set when using the cupsPrintFile() API.

It's my understanding that if no paper size is specified, it should
default to one of:
- The paper size info in the PDF.
- locale (A4)
- PPD DefaultPageSize (A4)
- lpoptions (not set)
- PPD DefaultTray (Unknown)

I'd like to know what order the defaults are applied in.  I'd also like
to know if I should set the paper size when printing with cupsPrintFile()

Cups 1.2.4 from CentOS 5.x


Regards,
Berend

I apologise for the disclaimer.


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