HP 4250 w/ Stapler/Stacker attachment fails to printer properly on Snow Leo

Question

We have an old HP 4250tn printer. We recently attached a newly purchased HP stapler/stacker to it. Under Windows XP, we can print to the printer's stapler/stacker without issues. Specifically, we can print multiple copies of the same document, each individually stapled.
On Snow Leopard (10.6.2), I can print a single copy of a document to the stapler/stacker and it prints and staples properly. However, if I instead attempt to print multiple copies of the same document, it attempts to staple all the copies together with a single staple. This clearly seems like a printer driver issue (since the XP box can manage this task).
HP refused to provide customer support because the NEW stacker/stapler was attached to an out of warranty HP printer. As such, we had to work out the problem this far on our own.
1) We did flash the firmware on the printer to the latest version.
2) We did power cycle the printer after the firmware upgrade and confirmed via the configuration page that the new firmware "took".
3) We went to HP's site and confirmed that the latest printer drivers for Snow Leopard are the printer drivers installed with Snow Leopard.
4) We confirmed we can't seemingly print from Snow Leopard properly.
5) We have confirmed that using the latest drivers on Leopard also results in multiple copies getting stapled together.
Any chance of a workaround or of someone at Apple giving a hoot about fixing this esoteric printer driver issue?
Message was edited by: JuanCab

Answer 1

Well, we figured out this is a bug in CUPS. In a nutshell, when you request multiple (let's say "N") copies of a document be printed to an HP LaserJet 4250, the CUPS driver, instead of sending one copy of the postscript to the printer with instructions to print N copies of the document embedded in the postscript instead makes N copies of the document, concatenates them into one postscript file, and then sends it to the printer. The printer receives a single large postscript file which is why it only staples it once.
My solution for now is rather hacky. I wrote a perl script that will take any PDF file sent to it and will print it N times, so that each copy is individually sent to the print. I then created an automator workflow as a wrapper so I can print multiple stapled copies via the PDF services menu in the print dialog box or by dropping a PDF file onto an Automator "Droplet" app I created. This works, but in a multi-user environment like my office, it is possible for other people's print jobs to slip in between the N copies, since they are all being sent individually. Also, you lose the ability for the printer to tell you how many copies remain to be printed.
If anyone at Apple reads these boards, PLEASE fix this so that the CUPS drivers for the HP behave properly and send the postscript file only once with instructions to print N times. BTW, it was possible to send N copies from the command line (using the "lp" command) in Leopard with CUPS 1.3.X and have it print properly (it appeared to send one copy of the postscript with instructions to the printer to print N copies), but Snow Leopard with CUPS 1.4 broke that (now, CUPS assembles N copies together into one postscript file and fires it to the printer).