CUPS: print Letter as A4 in A4 printer
Nuno J. Silva
for regular stuff: it's set for A4 and prints A4 as expected.
But now I've been printing Letter documents once in a while, and CUPS
behaves as if these documents were actually being printed in Letter
stationery.
The problem is that stuff like page numbers sometimes disappear, because
they're outside the (Letter) printing/imageable area. This is fair, CUPS
is just enforcing the right margins for that paper size, but these
numbers wouldn't be cropped in A4, they're inside the A4 imageable area
(A4 is taller than Letter).
So I want to print Letter documents in A4. I can do it using a couple
pipes (or just one, if it's already postscript)
pdftops paper.pdf - | psresize -Pletter -pa4 | lpr
but I wonder if there's a way to have CUPS do this resizing itself.
--
Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
unruh
> My printing system (CUPS with a HP Deskjet 690C, hpijs) works perfectly
> for regular stuff: it's set for A4 and prints A4 as expected.
>
> But now I've been printing Letter documents once in a while, and CUPS
> behaves as if these documents were actually being printed in Letter
> stationery.
It is probably your software from which you are doing the printing which
is telling the printer to print letter. many (eg acroread) have a
scaling function to scale the letter to A4 paper.
>
> The problem is that stuff like page numbers sometimes disappear, because
> they're outside the (Letter) printing/imageable area. This is fair, CUPS
> is just enforcing the right margins for that paper size, but these
> numbers wouldn't be cropped in A4, they're inside the A4 imageable area
> (A4 is taller than Letter).
>
>
> So I want to print Letter documents in A4. I can do it using a couple
> pipes (or just one, if it's already postscript)
>
> pdftops paper.pdf - | psresize -Pletter -pa4 | lpr
So, it is pdf you are printing?
>
> but I wonder if there's a way to have CUPS do this resizing itself.
>
Or have your pdf reader do it?
Nuno J. Silva
> On 2011-09-01, Nuno J. Silva <nunoj...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> My printing system (CUPS with a HP Deskjet 690C, hpijs) works perfectly
>> for regular stuff: it's set for A4 and prints A4 as expected.
>>
>> But now I've been printing Letter documents once in a while, and CUPS
>> behaves as if these documents were actually being printed in Letter
>> stationery.
>
> It is probably your software from which you are doing the printing which
> is telling the printer to print letter. many (eg acroread) have a
> scaling function to scale the letter to A4 paper.
I'm using lpr, and the paper size option has no effect
lpr -o PageSize=A4 paper.pdf
but I guess this just tells CUPS to pick A4 paper and has no effect on
how it processes the document.
>> The problem is that stuff like page numbers sometimes disappear, because
>> they're outside the (Letter) printing/imageable area. This is fair, CUPS
>> is just enforcing the right margins for that paper size, but these
>> numbers wouldn't be cropped in A4, they're inside the A4 imageable area
>> (A4 is taller than Letter).
>>
>>
>> So I want to print Letter documents in A4. I can do it using a couple
>> pipes (or just one, if it's already postscript)
>>
>> pdftops paper.pdf - | psresize -Pletter -pa4 | lpr
>
> So, it is pdf you are printing?
So far it has been just pdf, but I guess I'll have to print some
postscript files too.
>> but I wonder if there's a way to have CUPS do this resizing itself.
>>
> Or have your pdf reader do it?
I'm not used to print from pdf readers, lpr looks so simpler and
more keyboard-friendly.
If I have to rely on other tool, I think I'll just make an alias or
script to invoke psresize and lpr.
Feranija
try enscript with the option --media=A4dj or --media=A4. Alias
enscript with all options you like in your shell config file and that
would be it.
unruh
> On 2011-09-01, unruh wrote:
>
>> On 2011-09-01, Nuno J. Silva <nunoj...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>> My printing system (CUPS with a HP Deskjet 690C, hpijs) works perfectly
>>> for regular stuff: it's set for A4 and prints A4 as expected.
>>>
>>> But now I've been printing Letter documents once in a while, and CUPS
>>> behaves as if these documents were actually being printed in Letter
>>> stationery.
>>
>> It is probably your software from which you are doing the printing which
>> is telling the printer to print letter. many (eg acroread) have a
>> scaling function to scale the letter to A4 paper.
>
> I'm using lpr, and the paper size option has no effect
>
> lpr -o PageSize=A4 paper.pdf
>
> but I guess this just tells CUPS to pick A4 paper and has no effect on
> how it processes the document.
Correct.
lpr sends the input througha translator ( since most printers cannot
print a pdf file, but print either they own language or PS). So you need
to get info to the translator.
Note that lpr is NOT a cups command, but rather is itself a script which
translates the arguments to lpr into arguments to lp.
man lp
-o fitplot
Scales the print file to fit on the page.
-o scaling=number
Scales image files to use up to number percent of the page. Val-
ues greater than 100 cause the image file to be printed across
multiple pages.
might be helpful