HPLIP

layout for multiple landscape pages per sheet?

Asked by danielinteractive

Dear community,

I just successfully installed an HP Color LJ 3600 DN as network printer
in our home LAN, with HPLIP 2.7.7 driver for the latest openSuse 10.3 on my notebook.

My question concerns the mulitple pages per sheet layout which seems to be customizable in
hp-toolbox - printer settings - N-Up.
Specifically, I have 4 landscape A4 pages which I would like to print
on one landscape sheet (these are foils from some presentation and neet not be printed in full size), in
the layout (looking at the landscape sheet):

1........2
3........4

Printing from kpdf (in konqueror), the layout options are not customizable. However, I adjusted them
beforehand using hp-toolbox, and tried two options:

1) "Left to right, top to bottom", which in my understanding would be the correct one.
Unfortunately this was not achieved. The result was

3........1
4........2

This is left to right top to bottom for the portrait page! So I tried

2) "Bottom to top, left to right" but the result was not changed.

My question therefore is:
Which settings allow the layout I want?

Thank you in advance,
regards,

Daniel

Question information

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Status:
Solved
For:
HPLIP Edit question
Assignee:
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Solved by:
Johannes Meixner
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Revision history for this message
Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

Daniel,

If is possible for you to send me the document (email in my profile) and I'll try to reproduce and see what I can come up with for you?

Thanks!

Aaron

Revision history for this message
danielinteractive (daniel-sabanesbove) said : 		#2

Hi Aaron,

actually, you may download it yourself, so I don't spam your mailbox (1.4 MB):
http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~kneib/download/dkfz2008.pdf
I think it's a plain landscape A4 pdf file.

Possibly it's not a fault of HPLIP, but of kpdf/konqueror?
My task does not appear unusual to me, so if you had
a bash commandline solution, I would be very grateful as well!

Thanks in advance for the great HP service you are providing.

Best,
Daniel

Revision history for this message
Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#3

Daniel,

Thanks for that link.

I got it to print correctly. Run hp-toolbox, click print settings, i change the following settings:

media size: a4
pages per sheet: 4 sheets per page
Printed border around each page: one thin border
(i just did the last for testing, but you can set it as you require.)

and the key;
Fit to Page: on

then I printed the document from the toolbox, functions -> print

and that should work for you.

Hope this helps,

Aaron

Revision history for this message
danielinteractive (daniel-sabanesbove) said : 		#4

Aaron,

unfortunately I cannot reproduce this. My settings in detail:

***

Page Orientation: Portrait (because "Landscape" plus "fit to page" gives too small pages)
Duplex: Two sided (long edge)
Output Order: normal
Collate: Off

Page Size: A4
Printout Mode: Normal Grayscale
Media Source: Printer default
Double-Sided Printing: Long Edge (Standard)

Quality: Controlled by Printout Mode

Pages per Sheet: 4 sheets per page
Layout: Left to right, top to bottom
Printer Border Around Each Page: One thin border (no border does not change the layout)

Brightness: 100%
Gamma: 1000

Fit to Page: On
Position on Page: Centered
Saturation: 100%
Hue: 0
"Natural" Scaling: 100%
Scaling: 100%

"Pretty Print": Off
Banner: No No
Mirror Printing: Off

***

The layout is still wrong! I tried command line solutions using "lp" with options "number-up" and "number-up-layout",
but the results were exactly the same, as printing out of hp-toolbox.

Maybe this is an old bug in 2.7.7, which is already fixed in 2.8.2? Then I could wait for openSuse 11, where this version will be supported.

Thanks for your efforts,
Daniel

Revision history for this message
Best Johannes Meixner (jsmeix) said : 		#5

I get the same wrong page ordering
using HPLIP 2.8.2 from
http://software.opensuse.org/download/home:/jsmeix/
with a LaserJet 1220 with Foomatic/hpijs driver
with CUPS 1.3.5 from
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Printing/
on openSUSE 10.3

But when I test the CUPS number-up printing with

echo -en "One\fTwo\fThree\fFour" \
 | lp -d HP_LaserJet_1220 -o number-up=4 \
 -o page-border=single -o fitplot=true \
 -o number-up-layout=btrl

it prints exactly as it should.

Therefore it is the PDF which causes the problem.

Perhaps it helps if you additionally play around with
orientation-requested, see the CUPS documentation
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/options.html

By the way:
I provide for testing HPLIP 2.8.2 for the released
openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE 10.2, Suse Linux 10.1,
Suse Linux Enterprise 10 (SLE 10), and for the
openSUSE development version openSUSE "factory"
for 32-bit Intel compatible (i586) and 64-bit AMD (x86_64)
via the openSUSE build service at
http://software.opensuse.org/download/home:/jsmeix/

The packages are
* only for testing
* without any guarantee or warranty
* without any support
As an extreme example, this means that if your complete computer
center crashes because of these packages, it is only your problem.

Revision history for this message
Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#6

Johannes,

Can I get you to shoot me a quick email? I have a question for you unrelated to this matter. It's relating to linking to your repository from the hplip website and if the wording I have works okay for you.

Thanks.

Aaron
ke7ezt(at)gmail(dot)com

Revision history for this message
danielinteractive (daniel-sabanesbove) said : 		#7

Thanks Johannes Meixner, that solved my question.

Revision history for this message
danielinteractive (daniel-sabanesbove) said : 		#8

Hi Johannes,

your small example gave me the hint that I have to choose number-up-layout=btlr and not lrtb,
which I had assumed earlier - without "fit to page"...

So it works correctly if I change to

Layout: Bottom to Top, Left to right

in the above settings of hp-toolbox.

Thanks for providing the rpm packages, but I personally will wait until the official release,
because I can't risk compromising my production machine.

Regards,
Daniel