GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 710861
Evince adds strange header/footer to PRINTED page (page size issue?)
Last modified: 2013-10-29 10:01:37 UTC
Created attachment 258086 [details] pdf file (problem only shows on PRINTOUT) Evince adds a strange header and footer -- NOT visible on the screen -- to PRINTED page. For a specific example see http://imageupper.com/i/?S0200010100013F13826900992329126 (top left) That is a screenshot taken from a scanned version of the printed page. Again, the strange header is not visible on the non-printed pdf. It corresponds to a printout of: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2013.6515052 (attached). The footer only has 2 small vertical bars at the extremes, and a "bullet point" at the center. According to someone else who looked at this issue, it seems that Evince reports the page size as 8.11" x 10.86". Based on the registration marks the "header" is at over 11.5" which is outside the page size reported by Evince. The reproduced the problem on US letter paper. I use A4. Notice that this problem only arises on certain documents. As you can verify, the example pdf was produced (by other people) on a Macintosh with QuarkXpress 9.3 and Acrobat Distiller 10.0.0. Acrobat and okular do not add the mentioned headers/footers. Thanks in advance.
Those are crop marks and are part of the document. For example, here are some of the definitions in the document after: $ pdftk 06515052.pdf output test.pdf uncompress [...] /MediaBox [0 0 657 855] /yb2 828 /yb1 27 /yt2 819 /yt1 36 /Contents 24 0 R /Type /Page /pdftk_PageNum 2 /u2pMat [1 0 0 -1 0 855] /xb2 630 /xb1 27 /xt2 621 /TrimBox [36 36 621 819] /Parent 30 0 R /xt1 36 /BleedBox [36 36 621 819] /Resources 3 0 R /CropBox [36 36 621 819] [...] MediaBox specifies the width and height of the page. The cropbox specified where the page content should be clipped. In this case, TrimBox, BleedBox and CropBox are the same, and it is smaller than the MediaBox (see them in terms or coordinates). It might depend on the printing options. If you have set: - Page Size: A4 - Page Scaling: None Then, you will see some parts of the CropBox, because you are printing in a media size that can show them. However, if you set: - Page Size: A4 - Page Scaling: Fit to Printable Area It should work as I think you are expecting. For more detailed explanation of page boxes, see http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/page-boxes
I forgot to mention, not all documents have CropBox defined. That can explains why you see them in some documents and not others. Also, you can check the option using the Preview or Printing to a file instead.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 649886 ***
Thank you for your comments. I have done some testing, and indeed the problem disappear when "fit to printable area" is selected. The other two choices, no scaling as well as "shrink to printable area" seem to yield the issue on a HP LJ color CP2025. On the other hand, the crop marks do not seem visible on a B/W HP LJ p2055 under the various choices, so this may be printer dependent. If this is a feature, and not a bug, it seems to be exclusive to Evince, as far as I can see.