Two-sided printing

[josephj at buffnet.net]

Hi.  I have an HP895cse printer on the parallel port of my PII running
Mandrake 9.1 rc2.  I currently use cups to drive it. I think the driver
itself is the one HP released for Linux - something like hpijs, but I
don't remember how to get it to tell me.

Anyway, almost all of the printing I do is two-sided. I want that to be
the default for the printer.  Some applications like Open Office have a
two-sided option on the print panel, but it's disabled.  Others, like
Gedit don't even show it.

I have a work-around in Open Office, but it's ugly and error prone.  I
print all right pages reverse and then feed them back in and print all
left pages forward.  It works for even page counts (and for odd ones if I
remember not to put the last page back in.)  I told you it was ugly!

Please tell me there's a better way!

Thanks.

Joe