Brother HL-2240D on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint misaligned on page

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I’ve had the problem a few times, where a Brother laser printer seems to misunderstand the alignment or margins on a page. This results in the left margin being too far towards the middle of the page, and the right margin being beyond the printable page area, making the page quite unbalanced.

Brother HL-2240D

Brother HL-2240D

For me, this problem manifested even with the official Brother Linux drivers for my printer.

Turns out this is actually a problem with CUPS itself, not the print driver. There’s a confirmed bug for this issue, filed against CUPS here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/1184663

A quick & tidy workaround for this issue is to manually override the print renderer for the printer, like so:

lpadmin -p PRINTER-NAME -o pdftops-renderer-default=pdftops

You’ll need to change “PRINTER-NAME” to reflect the name of your printer.

If this fixed your problem, please subscribe to the bug report so the package maintainers prioritise it.

I found this fix through an AskUbuntu question here: http://askubuntu.com/a/349800