Workaround for Misprints of Samsung XPress M2825ND

I got myself a Samsung XPress M2825ND Mono Laser Printer for little money. Most of the time it does a great job: It is fast, very sharp, and the automatic duplex is a blessing if you have to print many papers. Unfortunately, if printing manipulated PDFs (like 2 pages per side) it doesn’t print properly: It leaves some parts blank. I did not notice any difficulties with ‘clean’ PDFs like created by Latex (as long as you do not use any further modifications in the print properties).

However, if I do the 2 pages per side modification externally (not in the print configuration) with

 pdfnup --nup 2x1 --landscape --suffix '''2x1''' --scale '''0.95'' input.pdf

 and afterwards convert the PDF to PNG and concatenate the PNGs to a PDF again

convert -quality 100 -density 300x300 input.pdf single%05d.png && convert -adjoin single*.png output.pdf && rm single*.png

everything works fine.

Nonetheless, the produced PDF takes much longer to process for the printer. I only apply this method if the normal printing fails (It happens only seldom and if mostly only one page, so the wasted prints are not serious).

Note: I haven’t had any misprints for some time using the newest Samsung drivers and Arch Linux. I only had a problem with “Select page size using document size” which resulted in very small prints if activated.