[cups] Printed area offset from paper area.

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

We are using CUPS 1.5.3 on Debian Stable (Wheezy).  There are several
makes of printers in our offices, mostly Brother, Epson, Gestetner,
NRG and Ricoh, all networked.  The paper size is almost invariably A4.
Printing from Linux applications works reasonably well.  But Linux is
really there to do the heavy lifting, and few Linux applications are
in daily use by office staff themselves - they are largely confined to
email, and relatively little printing takes place from email-centric
applications.

Most of the other applications (production, finance) are unavoidably
Windows based because of the need to interoperate with Windows-only
suppliers and customers.

However printing from Windows applications via CUPS to these printers
is unsatisfactory.  It seems that the entire printable area is placed
(on A4) about 20mm too high and about 20mm too far to the right, with
the result that some of the text is not printed on the paper at all.

It does not seem to matter which version of Windows is used.  It does
not seem to matter if the print job is PostScript or PDF.  It does not
seem to matter what the Windows application is.  It does not seem to
matter whether we use PPD files provided by printer manufacturers or a
CUPS-provided generic PPD file to print PostScript from Windows using
the Windows Imagesetter drivers.  It does not seem to matter if the
printers are connected directly to the LAN or connected to a computer
which shares the printer via CUPS.

Hitting the search engines seems to be telling me that this problem is
a fairly common one but solutions seem less common.  We ourselves have
suffered from this problem for several years.  The workaround has been
to print directly to the printers from the Windows applications, but
it means that drivers have to be installed on all the Windows machines
which does not scale well.  Currently I am installing drivers for all
the printers on a Windows print server to get around that issue.

Am I missing something obvious?

-- 

73,
Ged.