[cups] Printed area offset from paper area

[G.W. Haywood]

Hello again,

Thanks again for taking the time.  This is like a foreign language to me.
It reminds me of the last time I drove through Belgium. :(

On Mon, 3 Nov 2014, Helge Blischke wrote:

> ...dictionary named ?statusdict?. This may cause your issues, because
> a) most printers speaking PostScript now are level 2 or even level 3 printers
>    and do not implement these ?compatibility operators? any more,

In this context I have no idea what a dictionary is, and I don't know
what 'compatibility operators' are, but I'm fairly sure that the printer
which I gave as an example is a level 3 printer because it says so in the
PPD file which came from the manufacturer:

win7host02:~$ >>> grep Level /usr/share/cups/model/MFC7860DW.ppd 
*LanguageLevel: "3"

> ... I suspect that your CUPS installation uses the cups-filters package
> from open printing.org, which by default convert incoming PostScript jobs
> to PDF using a pstopdf filter. ...

Interesting.  Indeed the same problems appear on printing PDF files.

> ... I suspect that it (they) use some hard coded defaults if they cannot 
> deduce
> the proper page size and image position from within the job and/or the 
> printer?s PPD.
> 
> So, the first suggestion I could give you is to replace the M$ generic PPDs 
> by
> e.g. Adobe?s ADIST3.PPD or similar.

Well I haven't a clue how you make the deductions and how on Earth you
arrive at your first suggestion, but I'll gladly try it.  There's just
one problem - where do I find ADIST3.PPD???  I've searched the entire
planet using all the obvious search engines - and a few less obvious
ones - and I specifically searched the adobe.com Website using both
Google's search engine and Adobe's own.  The closest I got was a pair
of 'distiller' scripts (one Bash, one Perl, claim they fix a Y2k bug!)
but no sign of this PPD file.  It's not even mentioned.  If there's a
copy in any of the filesystems on our LAN it's very well hidden.  How
do you know about it?  How would I know a similar one?  What makes PPD
files similar?  Or dissimilar?

Can you recommend a book that I can read about this stuff so I don't
have to keep asking all these dumb questions?

--

73,
Ged.