manual double-sided printing

April 30, 2007 6:54 AM

I'm looking for a manual duplex printing solution/utility

I have an old HP 6MP and I'd like to find a software solution for manual duplexing or double-sided printing. I'm aware of print options in the MS-Word print setup menu that make this possible, but I'd really like something that works across and independently of all my Windows desktop applications. I'd just like to print a wad of paper, flip it upside down, and refeed. I'd rather not go throught the argle-bargle of figuring (or guessing) if page count is odd or even, leaving the last (or is it the first?) page out if odd, remembering to print the odds in order then the evens in reverse and all that stuff. My searches so far only turned up the rather pricey utilities FinePrint and Bookprint which seem to have way more features than I need.

posted by klarck to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Have you actually looked for this in your 6MP's property sheet? Lots of HP printer drivers have manual duplexing as an option, quite independent of Word's "even/odd pages only" thing, and it works pretty much the way you want.
posted by flabdablet at 8:35 AM on April 30, 2007

Response by poster: Yes, I was hoping to somehow turn it on via the printer driver. I played with different drivers/versions over the weekend and couldn't find any that gave me the manual duplex option. As far as I can tell, it requires 10Mb of printer memory to work at 600dpi; I have 4Mb. I can't figure out if the additional memory would somehow automatically show me a manual duplex option or not.
posted by klarck at 8:50 AM on April 30, 2007

If you can print to postscript from any application, you can use psutils to manipulate the postscript files you wish to print. E.g. separate odd/even pages, reverse the second half, print first half, feed back in, print second half. Command-line-fu necessary though.
posted by mikshir at 10:19 AM on April 30, 2007

I don't quite get why the printer memory would affect manual-duplex printing.

I've tried it once or twice with a recent HP inkjet ... it's all done in the driver. Basically it just prints the odd pages, then tells you how to re-insert them into the printer, and prints the even ones on the back side.

I very much doubt that it's storing the additional pages in the printer's internal memory during the flip-over time. All the logic seems to be in the Windows driver.

I think the option to duplex was in the "Printer Properties" (I think that's what it's called ... you get to it by clicking the 'properties' button next to the printer name) dialog, and it was called "Long-Edge Binding."

To be honest I thought it was a bit useless (I got all excited for a second because I thought maybe the printer had a secret duplexing feature that I wasn't aware of), but to each their own.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:28 AM on April 30, 2007

Also, HP printers pretty much all speak PCL; you might be able to get away with a driver for a more recent printer, if you can find one that has the duplexing option you want.
posted by flabdablet at 7:47 PM on April 30, 2007