Arch Linux

edrich

Member

Registered: 2011-08-10

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

[As a relatively new (2 months) Arch user, this is my first post so please forgive any etiquette errors, e.g. wrong section.]

After doing normal, regular (i.e. once most days) '# pacman -Syu' upgrades, my printed documents are now getting chopped into small pieces on multiple pages. This happens on both my printers (HP LaserJet 4L, parallel interface, and Epson Stylus Color Photo R285, USB interface).

I tried printing a one page '.dvi' file using '$dvips -t a4 -o\!lpr Filename' and also a one page '.pdf' file via Adobe Reader (a.k.a. acroread). In each case, both the printers printed four sheets, each sheet containing a quarter of the true output at the correct size in the centre of the sheet. Using the CUPS Administration web interface in Firefox, I also tried printing a test page on the LJ4L and this was printed on two sheets, each containing half of the correct output.

The problem has occurred since cups/libcups were upgraded from 1.4.7-4 to 1.4.8-1 on August 7, 2011 and ghostscript was upgraded from 9.02-2 to 9.04-1 today (August 10, 2011). Prior to the upgrades, both pages printed correctly. Rebooting the system after the ghostscript upgrade made no difference. I checked the upgrade output in /var/log/pacman.log as well as reading it onscreen during the upgrade and there were no instructions regarding reconfiguring anything. Have I missed something here?

I need to use both printers a lot so any help anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Last edited by edrich (2011-08-11 19:50:32)

steabert

Member

Registered: 2011-04-18

Posts: 78

Re: [SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

Can you revert the cups/libcups and ghostscript to their previous version and see if that solves the problem?

edrich

Member

Registered: 2011-08-10

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

Thanks for the suggestion, steabert. Remembering that I am still a bit new to this, am I right in thinking that

# pacman -Suu "cups=1.4.7-4"   [and similarly for libcups and ghostscript]

will revert to the previous versions? I am asking before trying in the hope that I won't cause even more problems. Thanks again for your response.

steabert

Member

Registered: 2011-04-18

Posts: 78

Re: [SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

No, I don't think that would work.  That command is used to downgrade to a repo version.

You can find more information at downgrading packages.

In short: previous packages are kept in /var/cache/pacman/pkg, so you can install a previous version by running:

pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/cups-$version.pkg.tar.xz

If you cleaned that cache, you can find older version on ARM and
download and install them manually.

There is also a package called downgrade, which can do both of these.

santiagoenluri

Member

Registered: 2010-03-06

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

I had another issue with this package, my epson tx300f printer stopped printing but it was resolved downgrading the package.

steabert

Member

Registered: 2011-04-18

Posts: 78

Re: [SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

If it works with a previous version, you should probably make a bug report.

EDIT: be aware that ghostscript just changed to version 9.04-2, so make sure you test the latest version before making a bug report.

Last edited by steabert (2011-08-11 08:56:04)

edrich

Member

Registered: 2011-08-10

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

I have now upgraded ghostscript to 9.04-2 and the problem has gone away. Printing is back to normal so we can consider the problem solved.

Thank you very much for your helpful guidance on the correct way to downgrade packages, I appreciate that.

steabert

Member

Registered: 2011-04-18

Posts: 78

Re: [SOLVED] Printed page now four pages at quarter size

Good!  Probably there was a problem with the arch package itself, as it went from 9.04-1 to 9.04-2 in 1 day, same ghostscript version but different arch release.  This isn't that uncommon in my experience, and minor problems like this are usually quickly noticed and corrected, in which case a downgrade can be a useful temporary solution.