a2ps and Landscape printing

[BigDaveyL]

I have set up my Hewlett Packard DeskJet 870Cse using the HPIJS driver. Seems to print fine in portrait mode.

I want to print 2 pages per page using a2ps in landscape mode. a2ps has been configured to use "letter" sized paper.

When i do:

Code: Select all

a2ps --landscape some-program.c

The result isn't in landscape, but in portrait mode, with part of the second page cut off.

(As a side node the same thing happens when using a HP LaserJet 2200dtn with the same driver, using the raw driver seems like a temporary fix)

What am I over looking?

[Naan Yaar]

a2ps seems to work fine in landscape mode on my box. Did you try dumping the output from a2ps with a "-o" and looking at it through ghostscript? If this works OK, it is likely to be a driver issue.

[BigDaveyL]

Looks ok to me.

Other drivers do not seem to work (ie pcl, gimp-print).

[mgkahn]

Like others, I could not get 2-column landscape mode to work with CUPS although it worked just fine with PDQ. After a zillion hours working thru the bowels of cups, I discovered that the problem is with the pstops filter (in /usr/lib/cups/filter directory). After I replaced the current version with an older version from a Mandrake 8.1 distribution, landscape rotation with and without 2-column worked fine!!!!

The source for pstops.c is dated 2002/05/28 19:04:50. This is the same as the current distribution from www.cups.org. There is one patch file on www.cups.org but it doesn't affect pstops.

The only posting on google regarding pstops is from freebsd which announces a new patch in the cvs tree for pstops.c that correts a problem with "rotating certain jobs (e.g. a2ps) away from specified orientation." This posting in fa.freebsd.cvs-all (ain't google amazing?) is dated 2002/07/31 @ 01:43:04 PDT -- well after the May date listed in the pstops.c source code in the current distibution. I suspect this is the fix for pstops that caused my problem (and others on this list) but it has not yet made its way into the official source tree.

I am not smart enough to know how to pull off the corrected version of pstops.c from the cups-base cvs tree. For now, I'm using the older Mandrake binary and all is working well.

Hope this helps others.

Michael Kahn

[corporate_gadfly]

I have set up my Hewlett Packard DeskJet 870Cse using the HPIJS driver. Seems to print fine in portrait mode.

I want to print 2 pages per page using a2ps in landscape mode. a2ps has been configured to use "letter" sized paper.

When i do:

Code: Select all

a2ps --landscape some-program.c

The result isn't in landscape, but in portrait mode, with part of the second page cut off.

(As a side node the same thing happens when using a HP LaserJet 2200dtn with the same driver, using the raw driver seems like a temporary fix)

What am I over looking?

I think you've covered all the bases. You say you have configured a2ps to use "letter" sized paper. I am assuming this means that file /etc/a2ps/a2ps-site.cfg has a line like:

Code: Select all

Options: --medium=Letter

Furthermore, I recently started using a2ps and I used the following to get the 2 pages per page using landscape

Code: Select all

a2ps --landscape --columns=2 filename

or the short form

Code: Select all

a2ps -2r filename

I know this is an old topic, but this might help someone else.