Bug#424071: evince: printing produces blank pages

Zack Weinberg zackw at panix.com
Tue May 15 16:53:28 UTC 2007


Package: evince
Version: 0.8.1-1
Severity: normal

[I'm reporting this bug against the experimental evince, but I observed it
with the unstable and testing versions as well.  Also, I don't know for
certain that it is evince's fault; please feel free to reassign it to
whichever part of the print chain is actually generating the bad PostScript.]

Whenever I print anything from evince, I get N blank pages (where N is the
number of pages that should have printed) instead of the actual content.
My printer speaks PostScript directly, and this does not happen if I run
the PDF through pdftops and feed the result to the printer (bypassing the
entire print spooler).  Yesterday I wanted to manipulate the printout a
bit before actually printing it, so I used print to file, and discovered
that the problem is actually in the PostScript generated by evince,
not in the communication with the printer (as I had thought).

I'm attaching two PostScript files.  Both are page one of the document
http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/private/baayen/publications/baayenCUPstats.pdf
(personal use only license).  baayen-pg1-bad.ps was generated by evince,
by selecting 'Generic Postscript' in the print dialog box, print to file,
and restricting the printout to page one.  baayen-pg1-good.ps was generated
by pdftops on the same file, with -f 1 -l 1.

Conveniently, both methods use basically the same PDF-to-Postscript converter,
so the diff is readable.  I think the problem is here:

$ diff -u baayen-pg1-{bad,good}.ps
....
 %%Page: 1 1
 %%BeginPageSetup
 %%PageOrientation: Landscape
 pdfStartPage
-2.9924e-17 0.207563 translate
--0.0017 -0.0017 scale
+26.1663 -0 translate
+0.9406 0.9406 scale
 0 0 595 842 re W
 %%EndPageSetup

.... I may be misreading it, but it looks like evince's output is scaling the
entire page down so small that it doesn't even produce a single pixel in the
printout.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-4-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages evince depends on:
ii  gconf2                   2.18.0.1-3      GNOME configuration database syste
ii  gnome-icon-theme         2.18.0-2        GNOME Desktop icon theme
ii  gs-esp [gs]              8.15.3.dfsg.1-1 The Ghostscript PostScript interpr
ii  gs-gpl [gs]              8.56.dfsg.1-1   The GPL Ghostscript PostScript int
ii  libart-2.0-2             2.3.19-3        Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii  libatk1.0-0              1.18.0-2        The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libaudiofile0            0.2.6-6         Open-source version of SGI's audio
ii  libavahi-client3         0.6.18-5        Avahi client library
ii  libavahi-common3         0.6.18-5        Avahi common library
ii  libavahi-glib1           0.6.18-5        Avahi glib integration library
ii  libbonobo2-0             2.18.0-2        Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii  libbonoboui2-0           2.18.0-5        The Bonobo UI library
ii  libc6                    2.5-7           GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcairo2                1.4.6-1         The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3              1.0.2-4         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2         0.73-2          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdjvulibre15           3.5.19-2        Runtime support for the DjVu image
ii  libesd0                  0.2.36-3        Enlightened Sound Daemon - Shared 
ii  libfontconfig1           2.4.2-1.2       generic font configuration library
ii  libfreetype6             2.2.1-5         FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libgconf2-4              2.18.0.1-3      GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libgcrypt11              1.2.4-2         LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libglade2-0              1:2.6.0-4       library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0             2.12.12-1       The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome-keyring0        0.8.1-2         GNOME keyring services library
ii  libgnome2-0              2.18.0-4        The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomecanvas2-0        2.14.0-2        A powerful object-oriented display
ii  libgnomeui-0             2.18.1-2        The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgnomevfs2-0           1:2.18.1-2      GNOME Virtual File System (runtime
ii  libgnutls13              1.6.2-1         the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libgpg-error0            1.4-2           library for common error values an
ii  libgtk2.0-0              2.10.12-1       The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libice6                  1:1.0.3-2       X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libjpeg62                6b-13           The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG 
ii  libkpathsea4             3.0-30          path search library for teTeX (run
ii  libnautilus-extension1   2.18.1-2        libraries for nautilus components 
ii  liborbit2                1:2.14.7-0.1    libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpango1.0-0            1.16.4-1        Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpng12-0               1.2.15~beta5-1  PNG library - runtime
ii  libpoppler1-glib         0.5.4-2         PDF rendering library (GLib-based 
ii  libpopt0                 1.10-3          lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libsm6                   1:1.0.2-2       X11 Session Management library
ii  libstdc++6               4.1.2-6         The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libtasn1-3               0.3.9-1         Manage ASN.1 structures (runtime)
ii  libtiff4                 3.8.2-7         Tag Image File Format (TIFF) libra
ii  libx11-6                 2:1.0.3-7       X11 client-side library
ii  libxcursor1              1:1.1.8-2       X cursor management library
ii  libxext6                 1:1.0.3-2       X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxfixes3               1:4.0.3-2       X11 miscellaneous 'fixes' extensio
ii  libxi6                   1:1.0.1-4       X11 Input extension library
ii  libxinerama1             1:1.0.2-1       X11 Xinerama extension library
ii  libxml2                  2.6.28.dfsg-1   GNOME XML library
ii  libxrandr2               2:1.2.1-1       X11 RandR extension library
ii  libxrender1              1:0.9.2-1       X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  zlib1g                   1:1.2.3-14      compression library - runtime

evince recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information
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