[cups] Problems printing two files in one job

[Claus Tøndering]

Thank you, Helge, for this information. I guess I'll just have to live 
with the (quite minor) problem.

Happy Christmas.

/Claus


On 15/12/2022 20.51, Helge Blischke wrote:
> Well, I do not completely understand what is going on here,
> but I at least have h hypothesis I’ll try to explain here.
>
> What I’vew learned from your log file is:
> —	Your printer is set up using an emulation of implicit classes (developed by openprinting to make the functionality of
> 	implicit classes implemented in cups 1.x available in cups 2.x) based on the functionality off cups-browsed.
>
> 	This approach seems - to me at least - rather complicated, and the key feature is that the backend
> 	„implicitclass“, which is used here, collects all jobs for the printer in question by executing the complete
> 	filter chain for each job file.
>
> —	This implies e.g. for PDF files (the cups-filter strategy is to convert all files to be printed
> 	at least intermediately to PDF using the pdftopdf filter, which - to my experience - appends an
> 	additional EOF character (^Z, I think) to each PDF file.
>
> —	Somewhere in the filter chain executed by the implicitclass backend the PDFs are processed
> 	by routines implemented in the QPDF library, which leads to PDF error messages caused
> 	by the intermediate ^Z characters — that is at least what I deduct from the various
> 	messages.
>
> as I myself do not use the cups-filters package (even on my Linux box I don’t), I have no chance
> to digest further into this problem.but I think my thesis cant’t be completely wrong.
>
> Helge
>
>> Am 14.12.2022 um 13:32 schrieb Claus Tøndering<claus at tondering.dk>:
>>
>> I have an HP OfficeJet Pro 6970 printer. I'm running CUPS 2.4.1 on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS.
>>
>> My problem is that I cannot get CUPS to print two files as one job. I try to print two files from the command line thus:
>>
>>      $ lp alpha.txt beta.txt
>>
>> The lpq command gives this output:
>>
>>      $ lpq
>>      HP_OfficeJet_Pro_6970_7BE7A4 is ready
>>      Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)                         Total Size
>>      1st     claus   62      alpha.txt                       2048 bytes
>>
>> Here, it mentions only the file alpha.txt. However, only the file beta.txt is actually printed. alpha.txt is not printed.
>>
>> When I use lp to print more than one file, these messages appear the /var/log/cups/error_log:
>>
>>     W [13/Dec/2022:16:58:28 +0100] [Job 62] /tmp/126c463a5b414: file is damaged
>>     W [13/Dec/2022:16:58:28 +0100] [Job 62] /tmp/126c463a5b414 (offset 14802): xref not found
>>     W [13/Dec/2022:16:58:28 +0100] [Job 62] /tmp/126c463a5b414: Attempting to reconstruct cross-reference table
>>
>> The first digits of the filename (in this case 126c4) appear to always be the hexadecimal value of the PID of the gstoraster CUPS filter that runs as part of the printing process.
>>
>> I've enabled debugging, and the resulting error log (366KB) can be downloaded here:
>> https://www.dropbox.com/s/fe7oruwlek1p1rz/lperror_log.txt?dl=0
>>
>> What is the problem here, and why is only one file printed?
>>
>> Until recently, I used CUPS 2.3.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I had the same problem then. I did a complete reinstall of everything, but my present system (CUPS 2.4.1 on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS) still has the problem.
>>
>> This is not a very big problem for me. I can always print the files as separate jobs, but something must be wrong nevertheless.
>>
>> Thanks for any help.
>>
>>
>> /Claus
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