Hello,
I have created a flyer that I want to print four times onto one sheet. As it is, the PDF only has one page.
Apparently other programs let you do this by entering “1,1,1,1” into the pages field:
In Sumatra PDF the pages field is greyed out, thus when I print “4 on 1” I get 4 individual sheets with only one flyer per sheet.
Can this feature be included in a future release?
AFAIK it all depends on your printer driver. In my laser printer’s case not only can I specify what I want in the Pages field, but I can click the Properties/Preferences button to open the advanced printer driver settings dialog, where I can specify what sort of Print Layout I want, be it Single Pages Per Side, Multiple Pages Per Side, Poster Printing (2x2, 3x3 4x4 etc.) and so on.
This is from Word 2007:
And this is from Sumatra:
It is the same printer, so I doubt that the printer driver is the culprit. Also when I select one of the other options in Sumatra’s print dialogue, the pages setting is still greyed out.
Unfortunately I cannot upload the pdf since your Discourse doesn’t allow it.
PS.: Weird to be a new user on a Discourse forum when you are a moderator on another one… 
-> Can only post one image per post… 
Here are some screenshots in turn from my Win10 system:
Word 2016:
SumatraPDF 3.1.2:
I just checked with our other newer printer (HP/Samsung SL-C480FW) and the Pages field was modifiable with it as well. Of course both are Samsung (well the newer one is sold by HP since it took over the business, but I don’t think that matters), so the drivers might be expected to behave in a similar manner, but it certainly indicates that Sumatra on its own doesn’t disable that field for everyone (or else we’d have received lots of similar reports earlier for sure).
That’s the thing - AFAIK Sumatra simply invokes the standard Windows print dialog with no customization. Notepad for example shows me the same print dialog. That’s why I doubt that Sumatra’s to blame, although I certainly could be wrong.
Upload it to Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc. and share a link, and I can check whether the document disables the Pages field on my system. Frankly though it seems unlikely.
IMO unless Sumatra’s code has anything specifically targeting that field, it’s most likely an issue with the printer driver itself behaving oddly for some reason. If you can, check with another Brother model or another manufacturer’s printer to see how they behave.
Thanks for troubleshooting this with me! I just tried with a multipage PDF that I didn’t create myself and I could modify the pages setting there.
If I export a singlepage pdf with Microsoft Word and try to print it from Sumatra, I cannot modify the pages setting.
Here is one of the pdfs that I’m trying to print: https://upload.disroot.org/r/AdS-zzdX#SU3923tKKYiwwyI0Mc8HVOFT7vHerBcC3Fg42Wfmn7Y= (link valid for 30 days)
I think your request to "add " feature may be valid, I too can print SOME PDFs at 1,1,1,1 using an HPprint driver from SumatraPDF, but am unable to print your PDF or many others from a variable library of different formats.
Without spending untold time checking why some do and others dont, my personal solution would depend on your desired reason for 4 up. The source file has an unusual size of approx 594 x 841 mm, A1 is very large for a “flyer”
If it is to be printed at 1/4 of A4, A3 A2 or even A1 my workflow would be to “select all” then “copy selection” in SumatraPDF and paste the clipboard image 4 times into MSpaint then print as many copies as required
NOTE MSpaint also does not seem to allow easily for printing 4 up
Yep, I can confirm. Not just with yours, apparently that’s how the app behaves with any single page PDF. That said, I can still click the Preferences button to configure my printer to print in whatever poster mode (2x2, 3x3 4x4 etc.) I want.
So you can add poster printing as a feature request I suppose, but TBH don’t expect it to get implemented anytime soon, or at all.
The idea of the source file is that I can print it as an A1 poster and a A6 flyer. 
To be clear: I’m not trying to print a poster (e.g. printing the A1 on multiple A4 pages. I’m trying to print a smaller version of my file (A6) four times on A4.)
I figured that I can simply print from within Inkscape. There is the same printing dialogue, but the pages setting is not greyed out.
I dug a bit into the code and this seams to be the place where the printing dialogue is configured and where it takes the pages range: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/blob/1f754eec0687e58c33400925d665240c3c6df3aa/src/Print.cpp#L598
Inkscape’s relevant code seams to be here: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/blob/master/src/ui/dialog/print.cpp
I wonder how they differ from each other and how much work it would be to implement the same solution.
Since it looks like Inkscape uses the cairo engine and your sample file was written by cairographics i guess you have the best solution there
@kjk does SumatraPDF simply assume that if numpages=1 then there is no obvious need to expose range ? is it a simple fix to allow single page files to be declared with user ranges (even if they seem Non-sensical) ?
In terms of printing we’re limited to what the printer driver and system wide printer dialog allows.
Some programs implement their own printer dialogs but it would be a lot of work to implement such a thing (not planned) and would require a lot of testing with many different printers to make it reliable (don’t have resources for such testing).
I think that SumatraPeter found that this only affects files with one page, our combined observations above suggest that behaviour is as expected when there are two or more pages, the sumatraPDF code referenced seems in a few places to be doing something along the lines of if number of pages = x then accept range
may or more probably may not be related to issue Parmeter-print-settings “2x” doesn’t work #621
Yes, yes, I got that from the thread title itself. My printer’s config dialog allows both.
Certainly seems that way, doesn’t it? But even if that’s so, I doubt simply removing that restriction will allow a ‘range’ like “1,1,1,1” to do what the OP needs without additional code to handle such use cases. (Edit: Tested with a multi-page PDF and as expected “1,1,1,1” simply resulted in 4 copies of the first page.)
I have untold single reduced 1/4 page copies of the flyer, however IF the driver alows 2 up or 4 up then I get 4 copies of the first page of a multi page pdf on one sheet
That’s directly with “1,1,1,1” in the Pages field and not via configuring advanced printer settings via the Preferences button? Which printer? Did you confirm with an actual printout? TBH I checked the output of “1,1,1,1” only with the MS Print to PDF virtual printer, so that might have possibly messed with the result.
Print driver is a cheap HP DJ 3630 but has a setting for pages per sheet from 1 to 16
If I set that in this case to 4 for SumatraPDF with a 2 or more page PDF and let range stay as default of 1-## (last page) it naturally prints pages 1 to 4 on the first sheet, IF I over ride range to 1,1,1,1 it prints the cover page in all 4 corners. I did NOT try a range of PDFs and it may not work with epub/chm UI nor did I try 1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2 however I think SumatraPDF may allow up to 10 values
It did NOT work with my default XPS virtual printer and I have not tried other PDF virtual printers but guess that IF they allow for n-up they MAY work too
So correct me if I’m wrong, but the final conclusions seem to be:
There’s no need for Sumatra to disable the Pages field for a single page PDF.
Till that changes, with a single page PDF one should be able to get the required output by specifying 4 copies of page 1 and setting the printer driver to print 4 pages per sheet.
1.There’s no need for Sumatra to disable the Pages field for a single page PDF.
CORRECT there is no need… BUT it does
or Current -
Note:SumatraPDF print dialog will allow range selection if the file is a 2 or more frame multi-pageTIF / animated GIF or a Zip with 2 or more PNGs etc. so it should also work with CBx or e-pub only if they have more than one page
Umm, of course it does! I was just reiterating what we’ve already discovered, not trying to defend it. Why else do you think I wrote “Till that changes…” in point #2?
Also, unless I’m off the mark, till kjk or someone fixes #1, #2 should be a valid workaround for the OP to get the result he’s looking for, yes?
