psnup does not respect output paper size

[AndyM48]

Converting a postscript file using psnup always outputs in letter size.
To reproduce take a four A4 page postscript file and convert it to booklet page order

psbook printfile.ps psbook.ps

Convert the pages to two up

psnup -p A4 -2 psbook.ps fpbooklet.ps

The result is a booklet file on Letter format.

[rrthomas]

What version of psutils is this? Your example works fine for me with the most recent version, 2.04 (and it should work in any 2.xx version). There's a (passing) test for setting a non-default output paper size in the current version. I also checked outputting Letter size paper, since A4 is the default on my system.

[AndyM48]

I am using psutils 2.03 running on Arch linux 5.9.9. My default paper size is also A4

[AndyM48]

There is an error reported from pstops:

$ psbook printfile.ps psbook.ps
[1] [2] [3] [4] Wrote 4 pages
$ psnup -p A4 -2 psbook.ps fpbooklet.ps
Use of uninitialized value $upto in subtraction (-) at /usr/bin/pstops line 277, line 12554.
[1] [2] Wrote 2 pages

[AndyM48]

Could not attach the postscript file so:
$ pdf2ps printfile.pdf

printfile.pdf

[rrthomas]

Nice choice of file! That particular error is fixed by 2.04, and I confirm that using your attached printfile.pdf with pdf2ps and then running your test, I get A4 output.

I also tried running the test with 2.03. I get the same error as you do (I believe it's harmless by the way), and I again get A4 output.

[rrthomas]

I tried changing my default paper size to Letter, and ran the test, and again I get A4 output. I'm sorry, I'm running out of ideas here.

[rrthomas]

You can attach your original PostScript file by adding the suffix .txt. Could you please attach that and your fpbooklet.ps file?

[AndyM48]

Something is strange here. I attached the file "printfile.pdf". It is a text file from the psnup man page, printed in pdf format.

Here are all the files used, having converted printfile.pdf to printfile.ps, in .zip format:
psnup.zip

[rrthomas]

Thanks. fpbooklet.ps in your Zip file is A4 format.

[AndyM48]

I really do appreciate your time on this!
If I look at the file using ghostscript I get:

If I convert the file to pdf using ps2pdf I get:
fpbooklet.pdf
I have no idea what is going wrong?

[rrthomas]

If I open fpbooklet.ps in gs (I was using evince before), it displays normally. (I'm using GhostScript 9.50 as supplied with Ubuntu 20.04.) Anyway, the DocumentMedia and BoundingBox lines say:

%%DocumentMedia: plain 595 842 0 () ()
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 595 842

which are A4 (divide by 72 and multiply by 2.54!).

The obvious thing that comes to mind is the default paper size configured for your installation of GhostScript; in any case, the output of psutils is clearly correct, so I'm closing the bug. I suggest you add "-sPAPERSIZE=a4" to your invocation of ps2pdf.

[AndyM48]

Thank you for your help and I apologize for my ignorance. :)

[rrthomas]

No problem! It turns out that Debian's ghostscript (and hence Ubuntu's) uses libpaper, so it respects the default system paper size. I guess Arch doesn't do that. You can however set ghostscript's default paper size in gs_init.ps.

[rrthomas]

Alternatively, you've not configured libpaper's default paper size?

[AndyM48]

Thanks - may be not quite so stupid :)

[AndyM48]

Absolutely right. "paper" is set correctly. May be paper should also let libpaper?

[rrthomas]

Thereby hangs a tale! Paper is designed as a replacement for libpaper, and I'm trying to work out how to get there…

[AndyM48]

I suppose you would not consider a rewrite of ghostscript while you are at it? :) :) :)

[rrthomas]

The idea is to have ghostscript use the new libpaper, indeed.