[Okular-devel] [okular] [Bug 252596] okular printing options not working when printing to file (pdf/ps)

[sur-behoffski]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252596

sur-behoffski <sur-behoffski at grouse.com.au> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |sur-behoffski at grouse.com.au

--- Comment #11 from sur-behoffski <sur-behoffski at grouse.com.au> ---
I'm using a similar version of Okular under Gentoo, and am seeing the same
results.  The complaint came from a users who was using Linux Mint 17.1 (with
up-to-date patches), so both sources rely on the Debian packaging system.  

$ okular --version
Qt: 4.8.5
KDE Development Platform: 4.14.3
Okular: 0.20.3
$ 


The problem manifested itself as Okular silently refusing to produce more than
one physical sheet of a 5-physical-sheet document... in a job where
4-pages-per-page was requested (on an A4 sheet, for what it's worth).  

I was eventually able to generate the desired printout using various pdftools,
provided by ghostscript-gpl-9.10-r2:

$ pdf2ps document.pdf
$ psnup -d -4 document.ps 4-up.ps
$ ps2pdf 4-up.ps 4-up.pdf
$ pdfseparate 4-up.pdf "4-up-%d.pdf"
$ lpr 4-up-1.pdf 4-up-2.pdf 4-up-3.pdf # (etc)

The key is that the pdf2ps step complains mightily about an ill-formatted PDF
document, but then does a best effort to keep going.  My impression is that
Okular sees this error, and silently bails out, leaving the user with a
mysterious failure.  The error/warning message on the pdf2ps step is:

$ pdf2ps document.pdf
   **** Warning:  An error occurred while reading an XREF table.
   **** The file has been damaged.  This may have been caused
   **** by a problem while converting or transfering the file.
   **** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.

   **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
   **** The file was produced by: 
   **** >>>> Microsoft® Word 2010 <<<<
   **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
   **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
   **** specification.

$ 

Incidentally, another PDF document, produced on a Mac with an Adobe toolchain,
did not suffer any problems when a 4-up print request from Okular was given.  

Although the feedback loop might be hard to manage (probably due to
asynchronous daemon issues), I would recommend that KDE and/or Okular look out
for this error case, and try to inform the user.  

Alternately, this bug might be fixed in a more recent version of Okular.  At
present, Gentoo only provides a 4.14.3 ebuild, and I haven't hunted around for
non-mainstream Portage respositories that might hold Okular 0.21.  

-- sur-behoffski

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