[cups] turning off fit-to-page [work-around]

[Gary Dale]

On 2024-01-04 09:32, Gary Dale wrote:
> I'm running Debian/Bookworm on an AMD64 server. I'm usually trying to 
> print to a HP CP1215 colour laser printer.
>
> CUPS has been a nightmare for the past year, but I get around it a 
> little by printing from the command line. My workstation can't seem to 
> print to the server's printers anymore so I have been working around 
> it by creating a PDF or image file and using lp to print from the server.
>
> However this doesn't work when I have a document that extends into the 
> printer margins. Then lp shrinks the document to fit the margins, 
> which is not what I want. I want the printer to crop at the margins so 
> I get as much of the document as the printer allows without any 
> alterations and without having to create a separate document for each 
> printer I might use.
>
> This brought me to the barely documented option "fit-to-page" which 
> (apparently) is turned on by default so that iOS users can air print 
> their photos. I supposedly should be able to override this by setting 
> fit-to-page=off. I supposed to be able to do this using the lpoptions 
> command or specifying it on the lp command using "-o fit-to-page=off".
>
> Neither worked.
>
> If I use lpoptions as either my regular user or as root, it has no 
> impact - using loptions -p <queue name> -o fit-to-page=off or omitting 
> the -p <queue name> - all 4 variants fail. However I did note some odd 
> behaviour setting the lpoptions. When I list the options, fit-to-page 
> never shows. However if I look at the lpoptions file, the global one 
> only contains the default queue name while the local user one appends 
> "fit-to-page-off=true" to the default line.
>
> If I put the -o fit-to-page=off in the lp command, the jpeg file ends 
> up printing over 4 pages, with about 1/4 of the image centred on each 
> page - possibly full size but not what I expected or wanted or can use.
>
> I will also note that running "lpoptions -l" never shows the 
> "fit-to-page" setting but it does confirm that my default paper size 
> is "letter". Nor is there a "fit to page" setting through the CUPS 
> printer management page (<servername>:631). However, I used to print 
> unscaled documents to this printer (just not through Gwenview which 
> doesn't have a print full size & crop option, which was why I 
> originally started trying to use lp).
>
> Is there a way I can get this to work?
>
I found one way to make this work - I fired up a Windows 10 virtual 
machine and printed from it. It's shameful that CUPS developers are 
trying to force everyone to conform to their code while Microsoft still 
accepts that people use older hardware. This is the opposite of what 
Linux is about.