Comment 26 for bug 258421

Another suggestion is the following (I do not know whether this is perhaps already implemented):

CUPS has sophisticated page management methods: N-up, selected pages, scale to fit, even/odd pages, ... These work very well if the page management is completely left to CUPS and not a part already done by evince or GTK Print and another part by CUPS. This is important because the page management actions have to be done in the correct order. For example if both 4-up and odd pages are selected, the first sheet should come out with page 1, 2, 3, 4 and the second with page 9, 10, 11, 12. So the N-up has to be done before filtering out every second sheet. For selected page ranges it is different. If the user selects 2-up and wants to print only page 1, 5-10, 16, and 17, he should get the following sheets: 1/5, 6/7, 8/9, 10/16, 17/blank.

So the best would be that in case of printing to a CUPS queue to always send the full document in PDF (the input file if it was already PDF) and the page management options as IPP attributes, as well as the PPD options. Then CUPS will do everything to get the document correctly printed.