[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#478706: unintuitive interaction between "-o page-ranges" and "-o number-up"

[Frederik Eaton]

Package: cupsys
Version: 1.3.5-1
Severity: normal

Hello,

Several times when I have wanted to print some subset of the pages of
a document, with "-o page-ranges"; but also 2-up to save paper, with
"-o number-up=2", I have found that cups does exactly the wrong thing. 

Rather than selecting the subset of the pages which I want to print,
and then printing them 2-up, it seems to format the entire document
2-up, forming half as many pages, and then it uses the new page
numbers of the 2-up pages to find the range I requested. Thus,

lp -o page-ranges=71-133 foo.pdf

prints pages 71-133 of foo.pdf, but

lp -o number-up=2 -o page-ranges=71-133 foo.pdf

prints pages 142-266 of foo.pdf.

I think it would be good if the "-o page-ranges" were fixed so that it
always referred to the pages of the *input* document, rather than to
the pages of some intermediate filtering step which the user never
sees.

Thank you,

Frederik

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages cupsys depends on:
ii  adduser               3.105              add and remove users and groups
ii  cupsys-common         1.3.5-1            Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.18             Debian configuration management sy
ii  gs-esp                8.15.3.dfsg.1-1    The Ghostscript PostScript interpr
ii  libavahi-compat-libdn 0.6.22-2           Avahi Apple Bonjour compatibility 
ii  libc6                 2.7-6              GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcupsimage2         1.3.5-1            Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libcupsys2            1.3.5-1            Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libdbus-1-3           1.1.2-1            simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgnutls13           2.0.4-1            the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libkrb53              1.6.dfsg.3~beta1-2 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries
ii  libldap2              2.1.30.dfsg-13.5   OpenLDAP libraries
ii  libpam0g              0.99.7.1-5         Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libpaper1             1.1.23             library for handling paper charact
ii  libslp1               1.2.1-7.1          OpenSLP libraries
ii  lsb-base              3.1-24             Linux Standard Base 3.1 init scrip
ii  perl-modules          5.8.8-12           Core Perl modules
ii  procps                1:3.2.7-5          /proc file system utilities
ii  ssl-cert              1.0.14             Simple debconf wrapper for openssl
ii  xpdf-utils [poppler-u 3.02-1.3           Portable Document Format (PDF) sui

Versions of packages cupsys recommends:
ii  avahi-utils           0.6.22-2           Avahi browsing, publishing and dis
ii  cupsys-client         1.3.5-1            Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  foomatic-filters      3.0.2-20061031-1.2 linuxprinting.org printer support 
ii  smbclient             3.0.28-2           a LanManager-like simple client fo

-- debconf information:
  cupsys/raw-print: true
  cupsys/backend: ipp, lpd, parallel, scsi, serial, socket, usb, snmp, dnssd