Jon Peatfield wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Mar 2008, John Summerfield wrote:
> 
>> Jon Peatfield wrote:
>>>  Today a user reported that printing from evince requesting N copies
>>>  results in N^2 copies comming out of the printer.
>>>
>>>  Now a quick check shows that doesn't happen for trivial ps files but 
>>> does
>>>  for trivial pdf files.
>>>
>>>  What seems to be happening is that evince is converting the pdf to 
>>> ps and
>>>  doing the N copies itself but also passing the copies option into 
>>> cups so
>>>  the cups server then multiplies it again.
>>>
>>>  I can find code in evince (evince-0.6.0-8.el5 srpm) which while 
>>> converting
>>>  to postscript for printing sends each page N times.  I can't find 
>>> where it
>>>  is actually sending the job to the printer specifying #copies but my 
>>> logs
>>>  on out print server show that the server is getting requests with 
>>> copies
>>>  set.
>>>
>> Doesn't the number of copies go into the .ps file itself?
>>
>> There _may_ be a template around that gets munged.
>>
>> Ah, I googled for "postscript language reference" it's all available 
>> on Adobe's website, but you might prefer not to print it all.
> 
> [ I have a paper copy of the PS language reference (level-2) 'cos I 
> needed it for a previous (development) job ]
> 
>> Look for where these are set:
>> #copies
>> NumCopies
>>
>> Page 417 (which Evince thinks is page 431).
> 
> I hope it doesn't set those directly, since it would be bad form.  Such 
> things are not supposed to be set by things except when sending directly 
> to a printer (in the same way that printer-specific options shouldn't be 
> used).  It is possible that it is passing the copies through as a DSC 
> comment which cups is extracting but I hope not 'cos that would be 
> probably harder for me to hack...

It has a proper description of the printer, it gets the definition from 
cups. I think it perfectly proper to assume the ppd it gets from cups 
properly describes the final printer.

Spoolers such as cups aside, no program on *x should assume ot has a 
real printer out there.

printing to a file doesn't explain anything.

I can, however, confirm the problem so it's worth reporting as a bug. I 
asked for two copies of the current page and got four.

> 
> What evince *seems* to do is send each page N time itself (there is a 
> loop in the code which converts to postscript).  Quite seperatly it 
> passes the number of copies through to the cups system so that when the 
> job is recieved the cups server passed N on the command line of the 
> pstops filter so it then causes N copies to be printed (either by 
> setting the relevant postscript options or sending pages multiple times 
> depending on other options which are set).
> 

In a moment of absolute brilliance I sent off a print job but put on 
hold so I can inspect it. There doesn't seem to be anything in the 
postscript, but in the associated control file there's this:
0000240: 3030 2100 0663 6f70 6965 7300 0400 0000  00!..copies.....
0000250: 0242 0019 6a6f 622d 6f72 6967 696e 6174  .B..job-originat
which I don't understand, but it looks interesting. Nothing interesting 
in the cups log, but you might want to try your hand with tcpdump to see 
what the actual traffic is.



-- 

Cheers
John

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