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Clovis
Asked: 2019-02-02 06:24:10 +0800 CST

Printing: wrong number of copies (N square copies)

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I just upgraded to 18.04LTS, I print over a network printer using CUPS. Since my upgrade, when printing N copies of a PDF (through Okular or Evince), I get N^2 copies printed. However, when I use a direct call to CUPS: lp -d my-printer -n 5 example.pdf I get the right number of copies (5 in this example). I guess the applications are simply calling N times N copies.

Moreover, the printing options (stapling, etc.) are absent from the Options panel, and I need to tune them through the general Setting panel of Ubuntu.

What is the communication channel between applications and CUPS? How can I configure my printing "pipeline" so that it directly calls something like the lp cmmand?

Thanks for your help!

Note: this is not the same situation as https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/265538/cups-prints-n%C2%B2-as-many-copies-as-i-want since in their case, the lp command was giving also the wrong number of copies.

printing cups-lpd

2 Answers

  1. This may be a result of the Okular bug Okular, when printing 2 pages per sheet, prints the wrong pages. which says:

    If I try and print two pages from a PDF (a Canon camera manual in this instance), two per A4 sheet, I get four pages, the wrong ones, two per sheet.

    As Nate Graham discusses it may be a lower-level Qt bug, which could possibly be Printing multiple copies with WebEngine results in printing (number of copies) * (number of copies) copies. which was allegedly fixed in Qt 5.8 and 18.04 should have 5.9.5, so I'm not sure why it would persist, but it appears there is still a bug in Qt or in Okular.

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  2. The purposes of this post: (1) suggest a workaround; (2) ask for bug-reporting advice. (I'm on plain Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, btw.)

    (1) On my system, this bug still shows up, and it shows up as an Evince problem. Like OP, Evince gives me n2 the number of copies of PDFs as I ask for. But...

    • lp -d my_printer -n 2 example.pdf prints two copies;
    • qpdfview prints the correct number of copies (ask for 2, get 2 printed); and
    • Foxit PDF Reader prints the correct number of copies (ask for 2, get 2 printed).

    So using either qpdfview (which is in Ubuntu software sources) or Foxit will avoid the problem arising from Evince.

    (2) Still, ONLY Evince will give me 4 copies if I ask for 2, and 9 copies if I ask for 3, etc.

    There are bug-reports relating to this issue (or one presenting much like it) on other systems:

    but I can't find such an item in the Evince bug-list. If anyone can point me to the bug reported there, great — otherwise, I should add this myself.

    Caveat lector: I see that there is meant to be a CUPS-based fix for this but for some reason cups-filters is still at 1.20.2 on my LTS system.

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