Bug 143342

(Bug originally reported to KPDF, reassigning to kdeprint as it's an issue if the KDE Printing system.)

Olivier,

it works for me from KPDF 0.5.5 / KDE 3.5.5; no "uses landscape format instead of portrait". Is the original PDF available for testing?

please read all the comments at bug 82123 to see how you can achieve with KDEPrint what you want in cases where you mix "number-up" with "page sets" and other stuff.

However, when you say, "the proper order of the pages instead would be:

  1 3
  2 4 "

this is subject to discussion. Other people ask for

  1 2
  3 4

as the "proper". And this is what *I* expect to get when printing portrait, and  it also is what KDEPrint puts out for me when I print A4-sized PDFs with the "4 pages per sheet" option.

Olivier,

when you use the n-up function in the KDEPrint dialog, n-upping is done by "pre-filters". KDEPrint uses the PostScript it received from the application and hands it to an external prefilter "psnup" to do the layouting before it is sent off to CUPS.

There are two other ways to achieve n-up: 

  --> use the commandline and send the PDF from there using the correct CUPS 
      options

  --> use KDEPrint, but *DON'T* do the n-up in the KDEPrint GUI (leave it at 
      "1") and enter the parameters in the "Additional Tags" tab.


CUPS commandline
----------------

For achieving (mostly) any order in layout you may desire for n-up printing (not only of PDFs, but any format), use the CUPS commandline options:

    * -o number-up-layout=lrtb   : Left to right, top to bottom (default)
    * -o number-up-layout=lrbt   : Left to right, bottom to top
    * -o number-up-layout=rltb   : Right to left, top to bottom
    * -o number-up-layout=rlbt   : Right to left, bottom to top
    * -o number-up-layout=tblr   : Top to bottom, left to right
    * -o number-up-layout=tbrl   : Top to bottom, right to left
    * -o number-up-layout=btlr   : Bottom to top, left to right
    * -o number-up-layout=btrl   : Bottom to top, right to left

To achieve your desired layout of

   1 3
   2 4

use a commandline like this for CUPS:

  lp -d <printername> -o number-up=4 -o number-up-layout=tblr


KDEPrint
--------

In KPrinter, there is no direct GUI for this (yet). But you can pass any commandline options to CUPS in the "Additional Tags" tab, including the n-up ones. That is, make sure KDEPrint runs *no* prefilter ("Pages per Sheet: 1"), and make the 2 lines on "Additional Tags" look like:

   +------------------+-------+
   | number-up        |  4    |
   +------------------+-------+
   | number-up-layout | tblr  |
   +------------------+-------+

This should do what you want to do.

See also comments in

  bug 108484
  bug 107936
  bug 97669

Olivier,

for more details have a look at these screenshots:

   http://bugs.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=19266&action=view
   http://bugs.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=19268&action=view
   http://bugs.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=19269&action=view

BTW, this is/was a duplicate of bug 107936. I would be glad if you checked for such kind of duplicates, before you dump Debian bug tracker entries about KDEPrint into KDE bugzilla  :-)   I appreciate your effort to clean up the old cruft in Debian bugzilla -- but let's not create more work for each other please, let's rather cooperate to make that mountain smaller, 'K?

Closing old Resolved status bug.