Mac woes - how do I print my documents like I want them?

September 18, 2014 2:20 PM

I have an Epson inkjet printer and a new MacBook Pro. In Windows, I can print manual duplex by simply checking a box (it prints even pages, then I flip the paper manually, then it prints the odd pages). But the driver doesn't support this in Mac OS X. HOWEVER, the reason why the simple solution (do it all manually! First print even, flip, print odd) won't work is that I want TWO pages per side AND duplex printing, i.e. four pages being printed on each piece of paper. How can I achieve this? I was thinking I could do a PDF print of two pages per side and then do the manual duplex, but whenever I've tried the output file is huge and the quality very poor. Also, this is a significant amount of extra work so I'd prefer a more straightforward solution.

PS: I've read this but I won't work because my issue is printing two pages per side.

posted by nagoya to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Are these incredibly long docs? the hackiest solution is just to type in the page numbers you want it to print the first time (e.g. for a 20 page doc, you would need to print 1,2,5,6,9,10,13,14,17,18) and select the 2 pages per side option, and then flip and print the other pages (3,4,7,8,11,12,15,16,19,20). If it's a lot of pages there are ways to get google docs/excel to spit out the pages that you need for you, but I typed that up in about 8 seconds so it's not a ton of extra time to do manually unless your files are huge.
posted by brainmouse at 4:00 PM on September 18, 2014

Doesn't Pages do this? If you have a duplex capable printer you should be able to set this up in the print dialogs.
posted by Gungho at 7:05 AM on September 19, 2014

Response by poster: brainmouse:
That's a good idea, but will it actually work with two pages per side as well? For some reason my intuition told me that option would only work with one page per side.

Gungho:
The documents are all PDF format so Pages won't work unfortunately!
posted by nagoya at 9:08 AM on September 20, 2014

Best answer: I print 2-up all the time. The 'even-only/odd-only' part is in the 'paper handling' sub-menu. (This method is fantastic for printing out manuals or other documentation. I 3-hole punch them and put them in a binder. I even choose for the pages to each have a 'hairline' around them.)
posted by Wild_Eep at 4:40 AM on October 6, 2014