Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 67996
Plain text prints outside proper margins
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:43:52 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020513 Description of problem: Sending a plain text file to my Lexmark Optra Ep results in a printed page with the left and top margins off the edge of the page. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Define a Lexmark Optra Ep printer in CUPS (I don't know if the problem occurs with other printers). 2. Print a plain ascii file to that printer using "lp" or "lpr". 3. Look at the printed page. Actual Results: The page prints with the top line and column 1 off the page. Expected Results: The page should print with reasonable margins, probably 80 cols by 66 lines. Additional info: Printing explicitly through a Postscript printer (e.g., "mpage -1 foo.txt | lpr" prints a properly formatted page.
The problem is not limited to the Lexmark Optra Ep driver. Plain text printed to an HP PostScript printer exhibits the same behavior.
This will be because the imageable area is set to the entire page area in the PPD files generated by foomatic. For the time being, edit the PPD file in /etc/cups/ppd and change the: *ImageableArea Letter/Letter: "0 0 612 792" line to: *ImageableArea Letter/Letter: "18 36 594 756" A future version of the Red Hat printer configuration tool will set page margins automatically for CUPS print queues. (Closing as 'rawhide' since this tool will shortly show up in rawhide..)
This solution (changing the imageablearea spec) does not solve the problem with printing from KMail. Margin control is very welcome, but there is a definite problem between KMail (and othe KDE apps) and the formatting/printing of pages. The particular suggestion of *ImageableArea Letter/Letter: "18 36 594 756" pushes the top of a KMail page off the paper and still results in a missing line between first and second pages. I will try to file a bugzilla against KDE describing this problem.
I'll reopen this for the time being.
The proposed solution does indeed cause the full imageable area to appear on the printed page, so half the problem is solved. But the page is still 80 cols x 60 lines, which is not the standard page layout. Piping through mpage as described above produces a page layout that's standard 80x66. It is possible that this causes the incorrect pagination in KMail (though I'm not a KMail user, so I can't investigate that further).
Set options 'cpi=12' and 'lpi=7', and also 'wrap=true'?
The margin problem is still an issue in Fedora Core 2. From the Lexmark Optra Ep ppd: *ImageableArea Letter/US Letter: "0 0 612 792" Haven't checked the 66-line issue yet.
Change these values using the system-config-printer tool. They are not set that way by default for new queues.
What exactly do I need to set? In the "Queue Options" tab, it doesn't appear that neither the margins (all default 36pt) nor the filter options page-top, page-bottom, page-left, and page-right affect the ImageableArea setting. Thanks.
Margins. But have you added a vendor PPD, or did you set up everything using system-config-printer? If a vendor PPD, how did you add it?
It's the system-config-printer PPD for the recommended Lexmark Optra Ep PostScript driver (in fact, the only driver choice listed for this printer). If you want to see it I can attach it. Will changing the margins shrink the size of the image or will it change the line width and page height? Changing the imageable area does not change the maargins reported by system-config-printer. Recall the other point of this bug, that a standard text page should be 80x66.
You can't change the PPD by hand, but instead must make changes through the system-config-printer tool. The effect of ImageableArea depends on the application that generates the print job. For printing text, it sets the margins used by the texttops filter.