Documents silently fail to print

I have two machine which are running Intrepid. One has 1.3.9-2ubuntu4, the other 1.3.9-2ubuntu5. My printer is a Brother DL-5250 DN which is accessed over the local network. I discovered this printing problem when printing out postage for my Ebay sales. For instance, I click on "View Paypal Transaction" and then "Print Packing Slip". This causes the status light to blink yellow, as expected. But instead of churning its innards and ejecting a printed page, the blinking turns back to a steady green. Printing from gedit, xpdf, evice, lpr, and Openoffice all fail the same way. Directly printing from Firefox, as in selecting File->Print works correctly as does printing a test page from system-config-printer. When printing does work, the yellow blinking takes an inordinately long time before the printer actually sucks up a sheet and prints on it.

This problem can be worked around by typing "sudo dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/cups_1.3.9-2ubuntu4_i386.deb" to downgrade to the previous version. After this, go into aptitude and mark cups to be held at its current (downgraded) version.

This might be another bug. Pressing "=" when highlighting a package in aptitude will not successfully mark that package as held. Here, we need to do "echo "cups hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections" to get things done. I'll file a seperate bug report later.

frotz, David, can you do the following:

cupsctl LogLevel=debug
cancel -a

and then send another of the failing jobs. Then please wait until the job disappears from the queue or gets into "Stopped" state. Then take the /var/log/cups/error_log and post it here. Please do not compress it.

Can you please replace your /usr/lib/cups/filter/cpdftocps file by the attached one? Please make sure that you make the new file world-executable.

Does it work again now?

cups (1.3.9-2ubuntu6) intrepid-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/local/filters/cpdftocps: Fixed the fix for the number of copies.
    In some cases it failed and pstops was called with 0 copies
    requested. (LP: #309314)

 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:58:55 +0100

This bug was fixed in the package cups - 1.3.9-11

---------------
cups (1.3.9-11) experimental; urgency=low

  * debian/local/filters/cpdftocps: Fixed the fix for the number of copies.
    In some cases it failed and pstops was called with 0 copies requested
    (LP: #309314, LP: #300312, LP: #286048).

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:58:55 +0100

The contents of /var/log/cups/error_log in its entirety is below:

E [21/Dec/2008:07:35:51 -0800] Unable to bind socket for address 127.0.0.1:631 - Address already in use.
E [21/Dec/2008:13:38:51 -0800] Unable to bind socket for address 127.0.0.1:631 - Address already in use.

Whoops. I forgot to turn on debugging.

The update, 1.3.9-11 has fixed the problem. Thanks.

This bug was fixed in the package cups - 1.3.9-2ubuntu6

---------------
cups (1.3.9-2ubuntu6) intrepid-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/local/filters/cpdftocps: Fixed the fix for the number of copies.
    In some cases it failed and pstops was called with 0 copies
    requested. (LP: #309314)

cups (1.3.9-2ubuntu5) intrepid-proposed; urgency=low

  [ Till Kamppeter ]
  * debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PCatalog.cxx,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PCatalog.h,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PDoc.cxx,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PDoc.h,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PPage.cxx,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PPage.h,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PPageTree.cxx,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PPageTree.h,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/pdftopdf.cxx,
    debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/P2PResources.cxx: Fixed problem
    of Landscape-oriented PDF files being printed in the wrong orientation
    (LP: #47649), added processing of the rotate tag (intrepid
    regression) (LP: #300312).
  * debian/local/filters/cpdftocps: Made correct number of copies
    being printed on PostScript printers with hardware copy handling
    (LP: #286048).

  [ Martin Pitt ]
  * debian/local/apparmor-profile: Allow cupsd to run Brother drivers.
    (LP: #237256)

 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:58:55 +0100

The corrected cpdftocps also has an error.
when printing xxy pages it prints y (y being the last digit) and ignores the xx (so i can print between 0 and 9 pages, zero being accepted and passed to the printer which receives it and then prints it 0 times)

the perl expression line 74 :
copies=`grep -a '%%PDFTOPDFNumCopies' "$infile" | perl -p -e 's/^.*(\d+)\s*$/\1/'`
only returns the last digit of the number given
i corrected locally to ( replaced * match with \D )
copies=`grep -a '%%PDFTOPDFNumCopies' "$infile" | perl -p -e 's/^\D*(\d+)\s*$/\1/'`
there might be side effects, but at least it removes the problem i have.

attached the corrected version of the file.

Thank you very much for the correction. I have uploaded it to the Debian BZR repository of CUPS.

I have also prepared an SRU for CUPS which includes your fix. The debdiff is attached.

This bug was fixed in the package cups - 1.3.9-13

---------------
cups (1.3.9-13) unstable; urgency=low

  [ Till Kamppeter ]
  * debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/filter/imagetopdf.c: Added support for
    the new "fit-to-page" option (new, more intuitive name for "fitplot").
  * debian/filters/pstopdf: Only apply paper size if the "fitplot" or the
    "fit-to-page" option is set.
  * debian/local/filters/cpdftocps: Only the last digit of the number of
    copies was used (LP: #309314).
  * debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/pdftopdf.cxx: Do not preceed the
    PDF output with a newline (LP: #303691). Only impose the page size from
    the PPD file to all pages if the "fitplot" or the "fit-to-page" option is
    set. This prevented from automatic paper tray switching to the correct paper
    sizes when a multiple-page-size document is printed (partial fix for
    LP: #310575).
  * debian/patches/pdftops-cups-1.4.dpatch: Updated from CUPS 1.4 SVN. Contains
    fixes for multiple-page-size document printing (partial fix for
    LP: #310575).
  * debian/patches/pdftops-dont_fail_on_cancel.dpatch: Removed, should be
    fixed in the new upstream version of pdftops.

  [ Martin Pitt ]
  * debian/patches/pdftops-cups-1.4.dpatch: Add definition of
    HAVE_PDFTOPS and CUPS_PDFTOPS, so that the filter actually gets
    again built with pdftops support. (Fixes Till's change from above).

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:52:20 +0000

Accepted cups into intrepid-proposed; please test and give feedback here. Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

David Hugh-Jones, frotz, zephyr, can you please try out cups 1.3.9-0ubuntu8 from intrepid-proposed and confirm whether the bug is fixed?

This bug was fixed in the package cups - 1.3.9-2ubuntu8

---------------
cups (1.3.9-2ubuntu8) intrepid-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/local/filters/cpdftocps: Only the last digit of the number of
    copies was used (LP: #309314).
  * debian/patches/pdftops-cups-1.4.dpatch: Let the pdftops filter only emit
    PostScript level 2 and not level 3, as some PostScript printers have
    problems with PostScript level 3 from Poppler, even if they are level 3
    printers (LP: #277404).
  * debian/local/filters/pdf-filters/pdftopdf/pdftopdf.cxx: Do not preceed the
    PDF output with a newline (LP: #303691).

 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:08:02 +0100

Yup, test2.pdf now prints for me.