Epson Stylus SX100: Reverse output order not working

[mbourne]

I'm setting up Linux Mint 18.3 (MATE, 64-bit) on a PC, with an Epson Stylus SX100 printer (also known as NX100 or PX-401A, I believe). The printer outputs pages face up on top of each other, so they end up stacked in reverse order when printed first page first. On Windows, I had set the driver default to print in reverse order (last page first) so that pages end up stacked in the correct order. However, I don't seem to be able to get that to work in Linux Mint...

The printer is connected by USB, and was automatically detected and added. Under "Settings" of the printer properties is:

• Device URI: usb://EPSON/Stylus%20SX100?serial=KQDZ004141&interface=1
  Make and Model: Epson Stylus SX100 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.11

Under "Printer Options" of the same dialog is and "Output Order" setting, with "Normal" and "Reverse" options. It defaults to "Reverse", but documents still come out first page first. I've tried setting it to "Normal", but that doesn't make any difference.

Under "Job Options" there is another "Output order" setting. That one defaults to "Normal", but again changing it to "Reverse" has no effect.

As a test, I tried creating a two-page PDF and then running:
lpr -o outputorder=reverse file.pdf
which apparently should print the file in reverse order, but it still came out first page first. The same with:
lpr -o outputorder=normal file.pdf

Having searched for other suggestions, I've tried adding a line *DefaultOutputOrder: "reverse" to /etc/cups/ppd/Stylus-SX100.ppd just before the *% End of... line (as suggested at https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... er-746843/) but again no luck.

With cups.service stopped, I've also tried changing the line Option outputorder normal to Option outputorder reverse in /etc/cups/printers.conf before restarting cups.service; again no difference to the printed output.

In the print dialog of the "Text Editor" (xed) application, there is a "Reverse" tick-box. Ticking that has no effect on the order of printed pages - the first page is always printed first. (In LibreOffice Writer, "Print in reverse page order" does have the desired effect; I suspect LibreOffice is reversing the pages itself before sending to the print driver, and obviously this is no help in other applications.)

There are Linux drivers from Epson at http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/searc ... &osCode=LX. I have not tried them though, as they're 6 years old and the closest option is for Ubuntu 8.10. As far as I can tell they're installed via custom scripts, not via the package manager, so I've no idea whether they'd be compatible with Mint 18.3 (suspect not) nor how difficult it would be to clean up the mess if they don't uninstall cleanly. Does anyone know if they still work and install cleanly?

Does anyone have any other ideas?

[pdc_2]

you could try the evaluation copy of Turboprint http://www.zedonet.com/en_p_turboprint_ ... tylusSX110

they have supplied very high-quality drivers for nearly 30yrs; since Amiga days;

_______________

I can't see you would do anything awful by installing the elderly Epson files; the commands would seem to be

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cd Downloads

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tar -zxvf 

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sudo ./pips-snx100-debian4.0-3.3.0-CG.install

[mbourne]

I managed to get the Epson drivers installed, with a few tweaks during install scripts (details below). Unfortunately the resulting driver provides very few options (only media size, quality and color) compared to the extensive set of options provided by the CUPS+Gutenprint driver - and there's no option to reverse the page output order anyway.

I'll probably try the Turboprint evaluation at some point to see if it does work, but for my usage it's not really worth paying for the full version just for this option. They don't appear to have an SX100 driver, but the SX110 one might be close enough.


Epson driver installation details in case anyone is interested...

I used the Ubuntu 8.10 version from Epson's downloads. Slightly confusingly, this downloads a file named pips-snx100-ubuntu8.04-3.5.0-CG.tgz - with "ubuntu8.04" in the name. Just running sudo ./pips-snx100-ubuntu8.04-3.5.0-CG.install would unpack the compressed data at the end of that file and run an install script (install-pips.sh) contained within. In order to inspect what it would do first and work through step-by-step, the following just extracts the files without running the install script:

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$ cd Downloads
$ tar -zxvf pips-snx100-ubuntu8.04-3.5.0-CG.tgz
$ ./pips-snx100-ubuntu8.04-3.5.0-CG.install --noexec --keep --target ./extracted
$ cd extracted

Having inspected the install-pips.sh script and the .deb packages which were unpacked, I realised some parts would fail but the scripts were likely to carry on regardless, possibly compounding the problems. Instead, I ran the following commands, determined by reading that script:

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$ sudo dpkg --install pips-common_3.5.0-1_i386.deb

The post-install script of this package creates a link from /sbin/pidof to /bin/pidof, which some of the installed scripts rely on. That link is not removed on uninstall (presumably in case anything else also uses it). Not really a problem, just seems a bit odd...

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$ sudo dpkg --install pips-ubuntu8.04_3.5.0-1_i386.deb

This installs, among other things, a script at /usr/local/EPAva/distro/ekpdsetup. One of the options to that script is used by other scripts to determine which CUPS service is used, but that detection no longer works. After line 141 (just before the closing fi of the if dpkg... block) add:

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        elif apt-cache show cups-daemon >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
            spooler="$funcdir/cups"

Continuing package installation...

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$ sudo dpkg --install pips-snx100_3.5.0-1_i386.deb

The post-install script of this package fails, leaving the package in "half-configured" state. That's due firstly to the same CUPS package detection as above. Even if that were fixed, it would still fail since it attempts to work out where to place PPD files based on searching for known names installed by the CUPS package, none of which are present. Rather than trying to fix that more generically, I just edited /var/lib/dpkg/info/pips-snx100.postinst to remove lines 27 to 62 (code blocks beginning Remove Get_cups_filelist= and installdir= up to the next blank line) and replaced with installdir=/usr/share/cups/model. A similar fix is required to /var/lib/dpkg/info/pips-snx100.prerm (lines 23 to 58) otherwise the package can't be uninstalled in future (completing reproduction of the Windows installation experience on Linux ). After those edits, complete configuration of the package, which should now succeed:

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$ sudo dpkg --configure pips-snx100

And some further configuration which would be done by the install-pips.sh script:

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$ sudo cp ./install-pips.sh /usr/local/EPAva/printer/snx100/uninstall-snx100.sh  # It looks like the uninstall part of this script should work, although I haven't actually tried it
$ sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/EPAva/printer/snx100/uninstall-snx100.sh
$ sudo cp ./*.lc /usr/local/EPAva/printer/snx100/
$ sudo /usr/local/EPAva/core/printersetup -i -p snx100 -s cups -a me300 -a ssx100 -a stx100 -a stx101 -a stx105 -a stx106
$ gksudo ekpd-tool

Click "OK" in the ekpd-tool application. I'm not sure whether it's actually necessary to run that unless changes need to be made. To set the new driver as the default printer:

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$ sudo lpadmin -d snx100