iOS7 duplex printing doesn't work

What print server are you running?

We have a similar setup and we have this problem as well.

Starting with ios 7 if our users keep the default of "Double-sided" on then we see the same thing you mention - there is no network traffic when Print is selected even though the iPhone/iPad indicates it is printing.

If they turn double-sided off then select Print there is network traffic and the print job prints as expected.

Before the update to ios 7 double-sided printing was working.

It seems that before ios 7 we could change the TXT record provided by DNS to duplex=f and disable the double-sided option. That no longer works either - however I cannot confirm that it did work as all devices I have access to have been updated to ios 7.

It would be great to know if anyone has a solution that would fix this. Right now we just have to remind our users to print everything single-sided when printing from an iPad/iPhone.

I found that changing my driver on the CUPS server from a Brother 8050 driver (the correct one) to a generic HP Laserjet 4000 driver caused the two sided printing option to disappear from the iOS device. This was without modifying the DNS-SD advertisment.

I'm seeing the same problem: Duplex print jobs just disappear into oblivion unless you manually switch it off every time you print from the device.

Changing the DNS-SD advertisement with deplex=f does not make any difference, but I have been able to get the iOS devices to stop showing the double-sided option by selecting "HP LaserJet 4100 Series v.3010.107 Postscript (recommended)" as the driver.

Choosing the "wrong" driver seems like a band-aid rather than a real fix. Anyone else have any further insights on the issue?

The iOS console shows an error message:

<Warning>: printer._ipp._tcp.local.: Print-Job failed: Unsupported sides "two-sided-long-edge".

when printing duplex. The cups daemon lists two-sided-long-edge as supported value for sides-supported ipp printer attribute. But it seems iOS has problems with that...

I am trying to find out now what it does when printing directly to a duplex airprint printer.

I've been digging on this for a little while, and it appears that IOS is requiring the IPP server to return the "urf-supported" attribute along with one or more keywords it "likes".

What I haven't been able to track down, is a reference to the actual interpretation of the URF values, which would allow the values generated to be relevant to the printer, rather than just cludged in there to "make it work".

I have it working in testing here now and will see about suggesting a patch to CUPS in the next day or so once I clean it up.

Mike-RS, are you actually making a change in CUPS to make it work (whatever you're descriving as a kludge)? If so, what are you doing exactly? Is it in CUPS as a whole or per queue?

Hi David,

It's a patch for the CUPS source code. I'm targetting 1.7.1 at the moment, but once it's nailed down, will produce a similar patch for 1.5.4; since we're tied to that on one of our production clusters.

I have not been able to find a way to make it work with changes at the configuration layer. It's a bit of a stretch without knowing exactly what IOS is doing, especially since the error it throws regarding "two-sided-long-edge" appears to be a misnomer. (I've run packet captures against multiple sources, and the attributes CUPS returns for it are byte for byte the same as a working device.)

HTH,

Mike.

Good to know. Thanks so much for your response and for your efforts to fix the problem!

Link to the CUPS bug filed with hack / patch for 1.7.1 -> https://cups.org/str.php?L4357

Best,

Mike.

Strange, for me iOS 7.1. didn't change anything in that respect. What do others say?

Works for me again with iOS 7.1.