Libreoffice will no longer print landscape page

Barry Drake, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu better. Could you please execute the following at a terminal, and post the results to this report:
apt-cache policy libreoffice-writer

libreoffice-writer:
  Installed: 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1
  Candidate: 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1
  Version table:
 *** 1:3.5.4-0ubuntu1.1 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main i386 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-security/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1:3.5.2-2ubuntu1 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main i386 Packages

Barry Drake, thank you for providing this information.

When you noted you upgraded a day ago, did you upgrade from a prior release? If so, which?

This was not a release-upgrade. It was a clean install of 12.10 alpha 3 including re-formatting, with all updates carried out almost daily since.

Barry Drake, just to clarify, you provided results of libreoffice-writer from Precise in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1040037/comments/2 but your noting your problem is in Quantal. Could you please restate when the problem did not occur and when it did?

Problem was not present on Monday 20th August but appeared on the Tuesday after the available upgrades were installed last thing Monday night. The landscape page had printed out OK early Monday evening and with no alterations would only print in portrait format on the Tuesday evening. I do not get the problem in Precise - only in Quantal which I have as a dual boot with Precise. Currently I'm booting into Precise to print the landscape pages and this works just fine with the same file.

d-drake: Please dont mix in the precise versions (that seem to be working fine, if Iead you correctly), but state the versions you have on quantal before and after the update that broke it.

Current version is: Version 3.6.0.2 (Build ID: 360m1(Build:102)) I have no record of what the version was prior to the broken version: I assume it is the same as I only took an update. I've attached the apt logfile. There was no apparent change to libreoffice on August 20th, but there was a cups update and various other updates .... I don't know where else to look.

Further information: Problem still exists after today's updates. If I print-to-file and then print out the resulting pdf, this does print in landscape format.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I updated to ubuntu 12.10 and now I am affected by this bug.

I followed the advice: "Open any LibreOffice app and go to File=>Printer Settings=>Properties=>Device tab. Is the "Printer Language type" set to PDF? If so, it's probably https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44664. The workaround is to change the printer language to Postscript (level from driver). See this thread: Libreoffice doesn't print landscape files properly" from this link: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/473302-problems-printing-landscape-libreoffice-suse-12-1-a.html

Now everything is OK.

Barry Drake, could you please answer the following questions:
+ What is the printer(s) manufacturer and model name?
+ Does the performing the actions noted in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1040037/comments/12 provide a WORKAROUND?

On 20/10/12 20:00, Christopher M. Penalver wrote:
> Barry Drake, could you please answer the following questions:
> + What is the printer(s) manufacturer and model name?
> + Does the performing the actions noted in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1040037/comments/12 provide a WORKAROUND?
>

Printer is Brother DCP 135C. I have reported the problem to the Brother
driver maintainer. The driver is provided as open-source.

I will have to investigate the workaround in the next day or two and
will report further.

--
Barry Drake is a member of the the Ubuntu Advertising team.
http://ubuntuadverts.org/

I have now tried the workaround and the result is exactly the same. My only workaround currently is to export the file as a pdf and print that using the pdf viewer.

Barry Drake, thank you for providing your results. Regarding your Bug Description:
>"Since update yesterday..."

What precisely did you update? Did you update from Precise? Updated your cups and/or libreoffice package?

The update referred to was the Ubuntu update for the day using update manager. It included updates for both cups and the libreoffice package.

Affects me too, since release upgrade from precise.

However, setting printer language to postscript (level from driver) DOES provide a workaround.

libreoffice-writer:
  Installed: 1:3.6.2~rc2-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 1:3.6.2~rc2-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 1:3.6.2~rc2-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

The printer is an old HP Laserjet 5L.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Jan Taborsky, if you have a bug in Ubuntu, could you please file a new report by executing the following in a terminal:
ubuntu-bug cups

For more on this, please see the Ubuntu Bug Control and Ubuntu Bug Squad article:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/BestPractices#X.2BAC8-Reporting.Focus_on_One_Issue

and Ubuntu Community article:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

When opening up the new report, please feel free to subscribe me to it. Thank you for your understanding.

Barry Drake, regarding your comments https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/1040037/comments/14 :
>"I have reported the problem to the Brother driver maintainer. The driver is provided as open-source."

Did you file this in a bug tracker? If so, what is the URL?

As well, do you have this same problem printing to other printers?

There is no bug tracker for Brother drivers. I posted the problem at: http://www.brother.co.uk/g3.cfm/s_page/110100

I will need to borrow a printer to check out whether I have the problem with other printers. Will report further in a day or two.

Can everyone with this broblem do the following:

Follow the instructions of the sections "CUPS error_log" and "Capturing print job data" on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingPrintingProblems for the failing case (output file format must be PDF). Also attach the original LibreOffice file and the PDF file generated when you use "Export to PDF".

It would also be great if you do the same on Ubuntu 12.04 (where it does not fail).

Another interesting test would be to take the captured print output of 12.04 and print it with

lpr file.pdf

on 12.10 and vice versa. Does this work?

Have carried out the capture as above. The resulting pdf file from the cups spool is properly formatted as landscape and prints correctly from the pdf viewer. This is attached as test.pdf

Here is the libreoffice original.

Bug 1070510 is probably the same problem.

On my printers the file comes out correctly. Can you attach the PPD file of the printer(s) where the problem occurs (from /etc/cups/ppd/). Thanks.

As requuested.

At the moment, I don't have any other USB printers. I'm going to see if I can manage to put 12.10 onto an older PC which has an LPT printer port as I have a couple of paralell port printers I can try.

Barry, thanks. You do not need to worry about the connection type, the problem is independent of how the printer is connected (would also occur with network printers).

It looks like a bug in Ghostscript, which has to convert the PDF input file into PCL (the language of the printer). It seems that for some PDF files Ghostscript does not manage to rotate the content by 90 degrees so that it fits onto the sheet.

Please follow the instructions of the sections "CUPS error_log" on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingPrintingProblems.

After some testing with your files on Precise and Quantal I have found out that the problem is in the new pdftopdf filter of the cups-filters package.

Thank you for your files.

Reported bug to cups-filters upstream as

https://bugs.linuxfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1080

Here is the error log requested.

Sorry - forgot to attach it ... here it is:

Well I guess after reporting the bug upstream you don't need my files anymore.

Anyways, if you want me to do some more testing I'm ready to do it.

Just to say the latest cups updates have fixed the problem (at least in 13.04 testing).

I still experience this in Quantal with all updates installed.

Problem fixed upstream, fix will be included in the next cups-filters package.

This is great news, thank you.

This is so important that the fix should be backported to Quantal.

The fix in CUPS filters has now appeared in Raring, but not so far in Quantal.

Hello Barry, or anyone else affected,

Accepted cups-filters into quantal-proposed. The package will build now and be available at http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups-filters/1.0.24-2ubuntu0.1 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please change the bug tag from verification-needed to verification-done. If it does not, change the tag to verification-failed. In either case, details of your testing will help us make a better decision.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance!

I installed stock cups-filters (1.0.24-2ubuntu0.1) quantal-proposed and landscape-printing now works in libreoffice without the Postscript-level workaround as well as in other applications using the cups pdf printing stack. Great!

This works OK for me. Don't think I have access to add or change bug tags. Please mark verification done.

Also the reporter of duplicate bug 1086905 confirms that the proposed package solves his problem.

this problem also seems to affect Firefox 17.0.1 on Precise 12.04.1LTS with cups-filters 1.0.18-0ubuntu0.1

printing to landscape mode doesn't work - the page physically prints in portrait with the printout cut off the right of the landscape page text

regarding my last comment about this bug on Precise - it can be fixed (at least on a Brother HL 2250DN printer with cupswrapperhl2250dn 2.0.4-2 drivers) by the following "FIX" :

Applications -> Printing ..... Right click on printer and go properties

In properties click on Job Options and then under common options change Orientation to "Portrait (No Rotation)" - it seems to force the landscape to orient the correct way on the page

I hope that helps someone that this bug is driving insane in Precise....

The verification of this Stable Release Update has completed successfully and the package has now been released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regresssions.

This bug was fixed in the package cups-filters - 1.0.24-2ubuntu0.1

---------------
cups-filters (1.0.24-2ubuntu0.1) quantal-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/pdftopdf-landscape-fix.patch: Auto-rotate functionality
    added to pdftopdf to print landscape-formatted PDFs (for example from
    LibreOffice) correctly (LP: #1040037, Upstream bug #1080).
  * debian/patches/pdftopdf-multiple-copies-collate-fix.patch: The pdftopdf
    filter started the second copy of a duplex job with an odd number of
    pages on the back side of the last page of the first copy. Thanks to
    David Williams from Ricoh for reporting this and to Tobias Hoffmann for
    fixing this (LP: #1084534).
  * debian/rules: Added "DEB_DH_FIXPERMS_ARGS := -Xusr/lib/cups/backend" to not
    correct the permissions of CUPS backends (LP: #1076786).
 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:59:59 +0100

Is there any reason why this hasn't been backported to precise - it also effects that distrubition and it is still an active LTS

Tim Wiel, this is a significant bug in Ubuntu. If you need a fix for the bug in previous versions of Ubuntu, please do steps 1 and 2 of the SRU Procedure [1] to bring the need to a developer's attention.

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure