[SOLVED] Can't print documents in landscape format
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I have Slackware 13.37, LibreOffice 3.4.2 (Alien packages) and a Brother HL-2030. For some obscure reasons, I can't print in landscape format. It always comes out "upright" formatted (don't know the exact word) and cut at the edges. I don't even know where the problem comes from: LibreOffice? CUPS? Anyone else got a similar problem and knows how to solve it?
Essentially: "File - Printer Settings - Properties - Device" and change "Printer Language type" from "PDF" to "Postscript (Level from driver)" or the appropriate choice for your printer.
This setting changes back to PDF whenever you start LO and I haven't found the config locate for this yet.
Edit: If you select "Post Script Level 2" that setting sticks and allows landscape mode. You can set this via the "Printer Administration" utility as well. On my system, "Post Script Level 3" reverts to "Post Script Level 2"
Last edited by kingbeowulf; 09-07-2011 at 07:34 PM.
Reason: Correction/add information
Essentially: "File - Printer Settings - Properties - Device" and change "Printer Language type" from "PDF" to "Postscript (Level from driver)" or the appropriate choice for your printer.
This setting changes back to PDF whenever you start LO and I haven't found the config locate for this yet.
Edit: If you select "Post Script Level 2" that setting sticks and allows landscape mode. You can set this via the "Printer Administration" utility as well. On my system, "Post Script Level 3" reverts to "Post Script Level 2"
After a few hours of searching and experimenting, I guess I solved the problem.
1) The printer only seems to work OK with the drivers provided by Brother.
2) Drivers are 32bit only, so I had to install some basic multilib packages (thanks Eric) to make them work.
3) LibreOffice documents print OK with the workaround detailed above (thanks Kingbeowulf).
Unfortunately this single bug unnerved pretty much everyone - about fifty users in the network - so I replaced Slackware by Debian, where everything works OK, and some other pestering bugs - blank screen on logout in KDM, etc. - got solved also. Pity, because I preferred Slackware for purely sentimental reasons.
In OpenOffice, you can de-select pdf in the Options --> print form.
You do notice that this thread is five years old? In the meantime, we're running Slackware 14.1 everywhere again. Occasional stints on Debian, CentOS and Ubuntu LTS were just that: stints. Everything works perfectly, and the landscape printing problem was due to Brother's crappy Linux driver. Printer was eventually replaced by a HP Laserjet, which works fine.
Interesting! I've never been able to print PDFs in landscape properly via "okular" in Slackware 14.x to either a HP LaserJet 5 or a Xerox Phaser 8400.
I was led to believe it was a KDE bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181290
I'll have to try the "Printer Language Type" change suggested above.
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