Multiple-page printing issue

[JT Anderson]

Hiya,
We print packing slips from tablets using your app, and it works great, except one problem.

Our invoices are page-breaked so that we can print many as one job, but they each get printed to a different page. If an invoice comes up that is longer than one page, it's contents get squeezed onto the previous and next pages. so where it should be

Page 1: invoice 1
Page 2: invoice 2
Page 3: invoice 3 part 1
Page 4: invoice 3 part 2
Page 5: invoice 4
Page 6: invoice 5

instead we are getting:

Page 1: invoice 1
Page 2: invoice 2, top of invoice 3
Page 3: invoice 3 part 2
Page 4: invoice 3 part 3, invoice 4
Page 5: invoice 5

I don't even know where to start troubleshooting on this, please let me know if you have any ideas on what might be happening here.

[backwardsblade]

Have you tried other PDL options? I've seen odd behavior like that when a printer (i.e., like brother) doesn't support one (or any) PDL format. Have you tried other PDL alternatives?

[JT Anderson]

For what it's worth, they're HP printers. But the issue is visible in the print-preview, before it ever gets to a printer.

[JT Anderson]

I wouldn't even know where to start on choosing or changing a PDL. We communicate from the tablets to a cups server, then to the printers.

[BlackSpruce]

JT,

You say the problem is visible in Preview mode ; based on that can I assume you are using KitKat or greater devices and your invoicing app is sending the Android OS Print Service a PDF file. If so, then I assume the problem is somewhere in PDF generation. If my assumptions above are correct you need to look at the PDF generation which may well be the invoicing app.

IF I am wrong above;
Then are you in fact using the KitKat Android print Service? If not how do you trigger the print to my app? What OS level Android devices are you using? What format is the source document?

You have mentioned you are connecting to a CUPS server; are you using RAW PDL format?

Thanks
BlackSpruce

[JT Anderson]

The files are not PDF. We've got Galaxy Tabs, running 5.0.2 Lollipop, with LPD being the only print framework that is installed and enabled. Our invoicing app is actually just Chrome, it's all generated as a webpage. My developers tell me that the page that is generated that we print from is just HTML with a printing css stylesheet. We open the page in Chrome, click the hamburger menu, then click print, this gives us the print preview, where I can see the issue. so this is before I get to actually sending it to Cups.

I found the PDL options in LPD, and they are all set to RAW, I'd never changed these. I added all ( >.< ) of my companies printers directly to LPD using the bonjour scan, and the new direct entry for my cups controlled printer says PCL-XL - HP PCL 6. I changed my existing printers to use this PDL, restarted Chrome, reloaded the invoice batch, and in the print preview, I'm still seeing the same issue.

[JT Anderson]

Well, sorry to waste your time it seems. I just tried running the same job through Google cloud print. It seems to me that Chrome on Android is not handling the CSS property page-break-before correctly.I'm going to try to raise this with them.

[BlackSpruce]

OKdokie