Hello, all. We are working on a problem for one of our clients where print margins are not being set properly on a critical financial application, Timberline. To save retyping, I'll paste in most of the contents of our internal GLPI Help Desk (http://www.glpi-project.org/spip.php?lang=en) ticket:

One of Maryann's critical functions is printing checks. If they print incorrectly, it is extra critical because of the difficulty of reprinting them. Maryann eventually figured out that she needed to override the margin settings of 0,0,0,0 to 0.25,0.25,0,0 to have them print correctly. However, these defaults were never saved and had to be re-entered for every check run. That's a problem and prone to human error.

The call with Timberline was enlightening and may reveal a system design issue. Unlike reports, check runs do not have custom printer settings. They draw their margin settings from the physical print device. They can be overridden which is what Maryann has been doing but there are no settings to save; they always draw from the print device.

As much as this is working against Maryann, it is probably good design. It means that the checks will adapt to whichever printer they are sent.

The problem is when a check run is sent to the X2Go printer for printing to local printers. Now the problem is that two very well designed "features" interfere with each other and become a problem. Timberline is trying to adapt to whichever printer is chosen. However, the X2Go printer is also trying to adapt to whichever printer is chosen to give users the flexibility to print to whichever local printer happens to be attached. The problem is that, to do this, the X2Go print driver does not specify any margins (or it specifies them as 0,0,0,0) as it is physical printer independent. Now the Timberline check printer queries the X2Go printer to ask what its margins are (so Timberline can adapt to the printer) and the X2Go printer says, "I don't have any because I'm trying to adapt to whatever printer the user connects to me!" This is why the check runs work perfectly when sent to the network attached printers - they tell Timberline what their physical margins are.

I can see two ways to solve this problem. Each with distinct advantages and disadvantages.

The way I think is best is to leave the X2Go printer undefined. The user receives the PDf file and, when printing, after selecting the target printer should select "fit to printable area" in the PDF reader print dialog. This preserves the ability of the X2Go printer to adapt to any printer the user has, e.g., if Maryann decides she needs to print from home rather than from the office. The BIG downside is that is still an extra step and, if Maryann forgets to do it, a check run can be mangled and we have the problem of reprinting checks. [Note - this is a Windows client user and thus cannot print directly to the printer from the X2Go printer dialog]

The other solution is to hack the PPD file for Maryann's X2Go printer and set fixed margins. I'm not 100% sure how to do that but we can figure out how. The big advantage is that no user intervention is needed for the check runs. However, the big disadvantage is that we no longer adapt to the target printer; the margins are fixed.