CUPS – Filing a Bug Report

Brandon Nielsen, Zdenek Dohnal Sürüm all Last review: 2022-05-15

Deciding which component

Problems involving printing may relate to several components.

The configuration GUI (See above) is either GNOME 3 System Settings application or system-config-printer. These packages also provide the printer applet, handle automatic queue creation, and disable/enable queues when USB printers are disconnected and reconnected.

Most GTK+ applications use the GTK+ print dialog. If the problem occurs when using GTK+ applications but not when printing from the command line or from another non-GTK+ application, the problem should probably be reported against the GTK+ version which the application uses. You can find out the version by the following query (thunderbird is used as an example of RPM package):

$ rpm -q thunderbird | grep gtk
libgtk-3.so.0

From the output you can see thunderbird uses GTK+ version 3.

If the problem occurs with only one GTK+ application, and other GTK+ applications print fine, the bug should be filed against that particular application.

If the problem only happens with PDF files, the bug may well be in poppler (the CUPS pdftops filter is a wrapper around one of the poppler utility programs).

Report bugs only seen using the smb backend against samba.

For bugs only seen when using the hp backend, or the hpijs or hpcups drivers, select hplip for the component.

For bugs for cups-browsed daemon and its printer discovery, please select cups-filters

Other possibilities, depending on the problem, include:

  • foomatic (the Foomatic CUPS filter and driver)

  • foomatic-db (the actual printer database used by Foomatic)

  • ghostscript (which converts PostScript to other formats)

  • gutenprint (a driver that supports very many printers)

For anything else, or if you are not sure, choose cups or use your best guess.

Other information to include

Be prepared to include some information about your system as well.

Before gathering of information

  • Please change your OS locale to English.

  • Please attach gathered information as archive (example is here, you may need root permissions) to the bugzilla issue.

  • Please do not forget to trigger your issue after debug enabling and restarting cups and before information gathering.

Information to gather

  • the PPD file for the print queue (from the /etc/cups/ppd directory)

  • the document you are attempting to print — if the document is large, please try to see if the problem also occurs with a smaller document

  • cupsd journal logs when debug level 2 is turned on. See the how-to for turning debug2 on and for getting logs from systemd-journald.

  • if the issue is connected to a print job, attach journal logs for this specific job too. How-to get logs here, example with JID. You can find out JID value by command:

$ lpstat -W all

Find your job there and JID is a number after '-'.

  • If the issue is about f.e. 'printing from evince prints garbage, but printing from libreoffice works', then attach two separate files - first will contain logs when you print from evince, latter logs when you print from libreoffice.

  • troubleshoot.txt from system-config-printer (BEWARE: it doesn’t contain journal logs - don’t forget to attach them too).

  • make and model of printer

  • config files - /etc/cups/client.conf (if it contains any changes from default), /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

  • if the issue is with cups-browsed and printer’s discovery, attach /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf and cups-browsed logs gained by this how-to.

Some example documents can be found in the Printing Test Cases category.

Further reading

The main printing page and the printing terminology page have more information about how printing works in Fedora.

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