[cups.general] CUPS 1.4.2 on CentOS6: Problems with -o fitplot option

[Helge Blischke]

Jan Hubený wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> we have problems with printing postscript (or pdf) files with the -o
> fitplot option on our server.
> 
> Our server configuration is following
> 
> CentOS 6, CUPS 1.4.2, ghostscript 8.70
> 
> when we tested  the fitplot option with following commands:
> 
> lpr -Pprinter -o fitplot  test.ps
> lp -d printer test.ps -o fitplot
> 
> It seems that the option fitplot is completely ignored. The printer
> output is same as without this option. Further, it is not problem of one
> specific printer, the behaviour is same on all 40 printers in our company.
> 
> Moreover we suppose that the problem  is in the CentOS distribution of
> CUPS because of this two reasons:
> 
> 1) We test the cups print server with the identatical configration
> (files in /etc/cups/) and ppd's on Ubuntu server and the fitplot option
> works correctly on this configuration.
> 2) We have found a Redhat EL5 bug report which is quite similar to our
> problem and CentOS 6 is just free RedHat EL6 recompilation.
>    for the bug report see
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=629932
> 
> Finally, my questions:
> 
> 1) Did anybody in this conference solve this problem (on CentOS6)? How
> (workaround)?
> 2) Is there a way how to test where in the cups filter chains is the
> fitplot option ignored on my server?
> 
> 
> With regards,
> 
> Jan Hubeny
> 
> 

First, try using the option "fit-to-page" instead of "fitplot" as the latter 
has been deprecated since 1.4.x (but should still be available).

Generally, I suspect the pdf to ps converter used in your distro does not 
honour this option(s). In cups 1.4.x, the pdftops filter is essentially a 
wrapper that calls whatever is availyble on the system - xpdf based pdftops, 
poppler based pdftops, or ghostscript. The fitplot and fir-to-page options 
are passed to the called pdf to ps converter but then stripped off the 
options list for the following pstops filter to prevent repeated (and 
possibly faulty) application.

Without more information on the used filter chain and the implemented 
utilities it is hard to guess more on this issue.

Helge