Two-sided printing

[Joe]

Xpp comes up with the duplex option  disabled.  The printer doesn't do 
duplex in hardware, but the Windoze driver emulated it by printing all 
the odd pages reverse order and then telling me to take them out, flip 
them around and put them back in the paper tray and then printing all 
the even pages forward.  It also knew to print an extra blank page to 
eject the last page if the total number of pages  was odd.

Can xpp or something similar (preferably not x) be called from a shell 
script with everything in  command line arguments or a parameter file?  
If it can, I may be able to write a script to automate the above 
process.  If I can figure out a way to pipe print output to my shell 
script, then I can emulate the feature myself.  The only other trick is 
finding a way to display a dialog box (continue/quit?) that returns a 
status (-1/0) from the script so it will be able to wait for the first 
part to finish printing and for me to flip the paper before printing the 
second part.  This is not pretty and might only work for one print job 
at a time, but it might work.  Any ideas on how to proceed?

I have posted a similar question at linuxprinters.org.

Joe

Robert Meyer wrote:

>--- josephj at buffnet.net wrote:
>  
>
>>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.
>>    
>>
>
>Use 'xpp' to print from the applications, rather than 'lpr'.  When you try to
>print, xpp will bring up a dialog box that will let you do just about anything
>with the printer that it is capable of.
>  
>
>>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!
>>    
>>
>
>'xpp' should work here, too.
>
>Let me know how that works out.
>
>Cheers!
>
>Bob
>
>=====
>Bob Meyer
>Knightwing Communications, Inc.
>36 Cayuga Blvd
>Depew, NY 14043
>Phone: 716-308-8931 or 716-681-0076
>Meyer_RM at Yahoo.com
>
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>